Book of the Month
Twenty Authors, Twenty Days
Welcome to Sinclair Books. Today we are being joined by Author J.Gunnar Grey. We are being introduced to the historical mystery, Deal with the Devil (Part One). You can find an excerpt and trailer for, Deal with the Devil (Part One) below. Please remember to vote for, Deal with the Devil By J. Gunnar Grey on the poll to the right of this blog.
Book Title: Deal with the Devil, part one
Author: J. Gunnar Grey
Genre: historical mystery
Price: $5.99
Buy Page: Astraea Press - Amazon
Author: J. Gunnar Grey
Genre: historical mystery
Price: $5.99
Buy Page: Astraea Press - Amazon
August 1940
He wasn’t supposed to be on the plane. Now Major Faust is a prisoner of the English and he must escape before they break him. But every time he gets away, a woman is raped and murdered. The English need someone to hang. He’s the hot suspect.
He’s got to catch the killer, even though he’s helping the enemy. It’s collaboration, almost treason. It’s making a Deal with the Devil.
You can find the trailer for Deal with the Devil at the link below.
EXCERPT
late evening, Saturday, 24 August 1940
over the village of Patchbourne, England
Something soft and annoying whooshed past his face. Faust brushed at it, but it was already gone and he was too fragging sleepy to care. He dropped his arm to the bed.
There was no bed.
There wasn’t anything. His arm was dangling out in space. So was the rest of him. Faust snapped his eyes open. A strong wind pummeled him, tumbled him head over turkey. The ground was a long way down. He was falling and it was real, not some stupid nightmare.
Panic leapt like a predator through his veins. He twisted, fighting against gravity. An icicle of light from the distant ground stabbed at his eyes, swept past him, and several red flashes popped in quick succession. A rumbling vibrated the air, something sounding like an artillery round exploded nearby, and sharp chemical smoke scoured his nostrils.
Tight cords wrapped about his body, between his legs, jerking him upright and throwing him higher, dangling him across the light-slashed night sky. The rumbling intensified. His head snapped back. Above him, a parachute canopy blazed white in the spotlight from below. Beyond it loomed a huge dark beast, moving past in impossible slow motion. It towered over him. The parachute danced closer, second by drawn-out second; then it bowed, canted, and slid away, laying Faust on his back as it hauled him aside.
He gripped the harness shroud lines, chest and belly flinching. It was the bomber, the one he’d been riding in. The belly hatch framed Erhard’s laughing face, lit from below by a spotlight. With one hand, Erhard clutched the rubber coaming, cupping the other about his mouth. He yelled something—something short—which was overwhelmed by the racket and growing distance.
Maybe the plane was having mechanical problems—but they and the mechanics had tuned the Heinkel’s twin engines all afternoon. No one else was bailing out.
Erhard had thrown him overboard.
It didn’t matter how much schnapps he’d slugged nor how drunk he remained. When Faust hit the ground, Erhard was toast.
The spotlight’s cone slid from the front half of the bomber to the tail fin, the glare flashing across the metal and leaving a dark, mysterious line at the rudder’s hinge. The line and the glare slid across the matte metal, twisting and writhing, finally falling off the back edge. The bomber was turning from the light. It pirouetted in a slow, graceful curtsy like a prancing warhorse and plowed into the side of the neighboring plane. Metal screeched and crumpled. The two bombers hung motionless, pinned to the night sky by the fingers of light from below. Then Erhard’s plane rolled the other one over. Flames spiraled from the mass of cartwheeling metal.
From between the bombers fell a squirming, thrashing human. Another white canopy blossomed above it. But within moments the parachute silk convulsed in scarlet flames, melted to flaring sparks of gold and orange, and crumpled to nothingness. In a clear, bizarre second, Faust again glimpsed Erhard’s face, no longer laughing but mouth open in a scream not drowned by the clamor as he fell beyond the reach of the spotlights.
The entwined bombers exploded. Faust twisted, wrapping his elbows about his face, hands clutching the shroud lines. Something sharp and hot punched his right shoulder. Heat flared across his back. But when he twisted back around, the night sky was empty. The droning engines ebbed away and the searchlights vanished one by one. A final, embarrassingly late flak round exploded well behind the departing squadron and black smoke drifted through the remaining searchlight finger.
The light fastened onto him and his slaloming parachute, tracking his descent. He exhaled with one relieved whoosh. He’d been trained on parachutes before the invasion of Norway, months ago, but this was his first real jump. Okay, it wasn’t so bad. But he couldn’t wait for the ground crews to find him so he could scramble back to Paris, and if he never flew again, it would be too soon.
His breath caught. German ground-fire had no reason to shoot at German planes.
Where the heck was he?
The spotlight vanished, leaving him blind upon his stage. He glanced down just as his feet slammed into something solid. His knees buckled, tumbling him backward into stubbly stalks. The scent of fresh-mown grass was overlaid with the acrid tang of burning metal. Clouds lowered the night sky until he could reach up and grab a handful. Shoot, he didn’t want to deal with Erhard’s mess tonight, no matter where he was. Faust lay on his back and closed his eyes, letting the alcohol fuzz take over again. The klaxon of the air-raid alarm seemed to fade, not to silence but to an incomprehensible distance, like waves creaming over a remote Dover beach. Matthew Arnold wrote that one, about pebbles being drawn back then flung ashore by waves on the Sea of Faith. Ah, love, let us be true to one another...
But the unpoetical parachute harness tugged at his torso and groin, jerking him awake and dragging him prone across the field. The canopy billowed about. Sharp stubble poked his shoulders and back. He grunted, eyes jolting open.
There was a quick release snap somewhere. He fumbled with the harness, found something, and pressed it. It clicked and the pressure about his chest released, letting him twist from the harness. Any possibility of carefully gathering the miles of cloth into a manageable bundle was swept away when the rousing breeze yanked the ’chute right out of his hands. Crouched on his knees, he watched the white silk sail away, like some demented specter, toward a distant stand of dark waving trees, and tried to decide if it mattered a whit. Parachutes were reusable, weren’t they? Should he try to chase the thing down? He closed his eyes and rubbed his face. Nope, he was still drunk, worrying about a frigging parachute when he should be worrying about himself.
A quivering voice blew with the breeze across the dark void surrounding him. “Jake, you sure he came down out here? I thought he was heading nearer town.”
Faust’s eyes flew open. The wind gusting over his exposed skin, face and hands, was suddenly chill. He shivered and hugged himself. The twisting in the pit of his stomach was more than just alcohol coming back to haunt him. Some deep part of his soul, something as primeval as the night itself, quaked beneath his skin. But his conscious mind hadn’t yet figured out why.
A second voice spoke, more quietly than the first, and steadier. “Be quiet, you daft bugger.”
Another gust of cold air splashed across his face, reaching through his skin into his heart and brain and being. Faust heard his breath rasping in the night’s quiet and tried to still it. But the beating of his heart was just as loud and would not be calmed.
They spoke in English.
He wanted to be still so his unseen visitors wouldn’t detect his presence, but he had to admit he froze because he was too scared to move. It took long moments before he could convince his body to curl over and duck his head down between his shoulders to hide his face. And no matter what he did, his lungs demanded oxygen and sounded like a bellows working it.
“Jake, there’s something moving over by the trees.”
He was beginning to sympathize with poor Jake. The daft bugger wouldn’t shut up.
“Yeah, I see it. Let’s work our way over there, quietly, now.”
Faust tensed every muscle he possessed, ready to run or fight for it. But he wasn’t near any trees. His nerves quivered as the wind danced over his skin. It might be a small animal, shaking the branches at the far end of the field—then he remembered how his parachute had billowed about like a live thing and blown away toward those trees. He stuffed his hand into his mouth to stifle a giggle.
He held himself still, breathing more easily, until the discreet footfalls waned in the night. Then he scrambled up, balanced a moment to make certain he’d stay that way, and staggered in the opposite direction. A hedgerow bordered the field at the foot of a small hill, and a white-painted gate partway along glowed like a beacon. He scuttled toward it. There had to be somewhere he could hide.
