Can a billionaire lunatic start World War III over sugar cane? He just might unless globe-hopping war correspondent Peter Dees can find out the truth, and fast. That's just one ingredient in Charles Jaco's newest thriller, LIVE SHOT.

Readers at amazon.com have given LIVE SHOT five out of five stars! Want to read an excerpt and order a copy from your favorite on-line bookstore? Click here.

Peter Dees goes along when anti-Castro Cuban exiles stage a commando raid on Cuba. It all falls apart when a bloody firefight leaves one of his best friends dead. And Dees's intensely personal search for the killer uncovers a much larger plot, one that involves a stolen briefcase-sized nuclear weapon and an impending military strike against Florida. Dees only has hours to stop a war. In the meantime, he has to fight a hurricane, a beautiful Cuban intelligence agent, and the murky Washington influence only big money can buy.

LIVE SHOT rips along from the sun-scorched world of Everglades commando training camps to the faded languor of Castro's Havana. Along the way, Dees encounters everyone from Cuban spy Gloria Bravo and transvestite smuggler Tequila Mockingbird to a ruthless Cuban exile sugar baron and a Rastafarian jet pilot. LIVE SHOT careens to a surprise conclusion that only Charles Jaco could design.

Jaco's prose has been called "...elegant, earthy, funny, and profane." In his career as a journalist, Jaco has traveled to Cuba dozens of times and has reported extensively on the figures snuggled in the darker corners of international politics. That experience brings the world of sugar barons and Cuban double-crosses to life. LIVE SHOT is the second novel in the Peter Dees series. The first, DEAD AIR, is now out in paperback as well and was published in 1998 to critical raves.

"The feel of reality, the excitement of fiction . . . this is the book." - Bob Costas

"A smart, sharp, funny novel." - Mary Maitlin

"A thriller that's all the more exciting because it's so true to life; the sheer preponderance of reality will be enough to send chills up your spine." - Dan Rather

One of the world's most intrepid journalists, Charles Jaco has risked his life reporting from behind the borders of more than forty countries. Jaco knows firsthand the shady politics that often hide the truth from the public. Now, in DEAD AIR, his first novel, he blends international intrigue with a chillingly plausible plot to create the most action-packed thriller of the year.

Summer 1990. Saddam Hussein is stockpiling an arsenal of terror. Someone is covertly selling him the chemicals needed to make deadly biological weapons. Veteran TV correspondent Peter Dees - hard-living, wisecracking, eager for a break - seizes the story. But his sources, many of them his friends, are dying one by one, shot in the head execution-style.

Determined to uncover the truth behind theses slayings, Dees himself becomes a target in a insidious emerging plot. From Port-au-Prince and Cairo to the scorched deserts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq, Dees finds the conspiracy much deeper than he ever imagined as he discovers a shocking secret hidden inside a murdered producer's computer file. Then, along with the sassy, canny, and beautiful TV producer Melinda Adams, Dees's search for answers propels him into the very heart of a death-charred war zone.

Yet as Dees scrambles to piece together a story that could rock the world, he senses powerful forces closing in on him. For it seems that everyone - even the U.S. government - masks deep, damning secrets. And the closer Deed gets to the truth, the likelier it becomes that he will never get out of the country alive.

In his riveting novel of suspense, laced with biting humor and a breakneck pace, Jaco captures the spirit of the men and women who report - and sometimes shape - the major events of the world in a novel you will never forget.

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Readers at Amazon.com gave DEAD AIR four out of a possible five stars.

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