THE RULES OF SILENCE

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SYNOPSIS

“…the perfect marriage between crime and terrorism.”

Titus Cain lives an idyllic life as a self-made multi-millionaire and founder of a successful software company. He and his wife live in a large but unpretentious house atop a private hill on the edge of Austin overlooking the beautiful Texas Hill Country. And Titus is the kind of man who knows he has a lot to be thankful for.

Then Cayetano “Tano” Luquín walks into his life one summer evening escorted by three armed guards. Luquin calmly shoots Titus’ two dogs, and tells him he is now secuestrado, kidnapped. But not to worry, nothing will change. Titus is free to go on living as he pleases — but he must make a series of “bad business investments” over the  next four days that will cost him $64 million. And one more thing: his silence about what is happening to him is imperative. If he breaks it, those closest to him will have unfortunate accidents. Fatal ones.

Trapped in a criminal enterprise with uniquely terrifying rules, and realizing that every decision he makes could cost a life, Titus makes the first payment to buy time. But he’s no fool. He decides not to play by the rules, but to fight back. And to do that he finds an ally as cold blooded and determined as his enemy.

Taking a secret night flight to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, Titus meets with Garcia Burden. A psychologically complicated private intelligence contractor, Burden is a former CIA operative whose “former” status has suspiciously foggy parameters. And he already has an extensive — and alarming — file on Tano Luquín.

Luquín is far more than the gangster blackmailer he pretends to be. In fact, he is a brilliant and vicious independent operative with a global reach of terror. Titus’ “kidnapping” is only a next step in a larger international conspiracy.

Joining forces with Burden, Titus is quickly sucked into the vortex of a complex scheme that Burden designs and deftly maneuvers to silently gain the upper hand against Luquín. And it works. Until it doesn’t. Titus suffers heartbreaking loss, and Burden recalibrates. So does Luquín.

Titus finds himself in an impossible moral dilemma. To survive and to protect those he loves, he has to become his own version of the two violent men who bind him. He has no other choice.

AUTHOR’S COMMENTS

“…I planned to do the next novel with this secondary character as the protagonist.”

This is one of my few novels that have been set in Austin where I live. It’s both a pleasure, and a little unnerving, to do this. I don’t know why, exactly. But in many ways it’s liberating to do so, and in this particularly story I thoroughly enjoyed it.

This novel is another example (the other is SPIRAL) of an instance in which I created a secondary character that I would have liked to continue in subsequent novels as the protagonist. In fact, I had planned to do that with the next novel. I won’t reveal who the character is. But after you read the novel I think you’ll be able to identify him.

But that wasn’t destined to happen. Universal Studios bought the feature film rights outright … before my manuscript had even gone into copyediting at the publishers’. And they specifically stated in my contract that they were also buying the rights to this particular character! After that the screenplay was “fast tracked” and a screenplay was quickly written, then polished by a second screenwriter. And then, as is often the case with film rights to books … nothing happened. So one of my favorite characters still languishes in suspended animation.

To make matters even worse, the book failed to garner many reviews as previous novels had done. Frustrated and puzzled I looked into it through my agent and discovered that the there was a total screw up in the publisher’s publicity department and no more that two or three review copies were sent out to the usual scores of reviewers across the country. I don’t have enough exclamation points on my keyboard to express my dismay at this discovery!