Military Legal

Where do you turn when there's no one left to trust...? At sleepy Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, the Commanding General's wife Bunny Harris has been murdered, her head decapitated, and the Arabic word for "dust" scrawled in blood over the bed. Jack Garrett, a Los Angeles lawyer and former special ops soldier who is grieving after the recent death of his wife, starts working on the case with Cameron Wells, a beautiful, ambitious attorney who began her career in military intelligence.

Celebrating the people who honor interpreting, enforcing, and modifying that meaning, within the Rule of Law, though, is very much my intent. For those reasons, and another, Upholding the Constitution as a title, fit these categories of poems better than simply saying poems for "Legal" or "Firefighters" or "Law Enforcement."

Heroes is the second story in the Harry Waters series and the immediate sequel to Islands of No Return. Sometimes, whatever you do, the world conspires against you. In Heroes we find Harry fighting for his freedom, his career, against alcoholism, and to preserve what is left of his nightmare-ravaged sanity. On trial for murdering his best friend, Harry stands condemned by the man who was responsible for leaving his men to die in the deserts of Iraq. And worse, damned by the testimony of the woman he loves.

Attorney Paul Madriani defends a soldier on trial for murder and unwittingly steps into a maze of secrets and lies that the government, and even his client, would rather leave undisturbed. Madriani is faced with arcane ballistics evidence, a so-called "double tap," two bullet wounds tightly grouped to a victim's head, shots that can only be made by a crack marksman.

Ry Slaight was a rebellious cadet who almost destroyed West Point when he exposed and solved the murder of a gay cadet in 1969. Now, nearly three decades later, Slaight's been promoted to Lieutenant General and appointed Superintendent of the Military Academy. When a female cadet dies during parade, an autopsy establishes that she had sex with multiple partners the night before. Was she the victim of a gang rape? Was there a cadet orgy? Don't ask. Don't tell.

During his fourth tour in Iraq, Retired Captain Ryan Bennington, like many soldiers of his time, was fighting a faceless enemy. A split-second decision could mean the difference between killing an innocent civilian or losing an entire platoon to a suicide bomber. Ryan survives the war and comes home to conquer PTSD and chronic employment, only to be arrested for following the orders of his commander.

Much has been written about America's war in Vietnam, and an enduring and troubling subtext is the composition of the body of soldiers that made up the US troop deployment: from the initially well-trained and disciplined group of largely elite units that served in the mid-sixties to what has been termed an "armed mob" by the end of that decade and into the early 1970s.

By the early 19th century, several European nations had banned slavery, but while the United States had banned the international slave trade, slavery was still legal in the country itself. As a result, there was still a strong financial motive for merchants and slave traders to attempt to bring slaves to the Western hemisphere, and a lot of profits to be gained from successfully sneaking slaves into the American South and the Caribbean by way of locations like Havana, Cuba.