Part of Series
All Ace wants to do is sell the black pearls he got from the ghost ship. Why does it have to be so complicated? After surviving the an up-close encounter with a shark, Ace heads back to the hidden fortress in the Sierra Madre Mountains where he grew up. Little does he know that a war is about to break out, a war that threatens the very existence of his clan. Two Mexican generals have joined together in rebellion against the government. They have the soldiers. They have the money. They just need to rid themselves of a pesky band of Apaches—Ace's clan. Teaming up with Tom Jeffords, the former Indian agent who was blood brother to Chief Cochise, Ace has to find a way for his people to survive. Even if it means allying with the hated Yaqui tribe. (Based on actual events.)
Author
Born in 1965, I grew up on a working cattle ranch in the desert thirty miles from Wickenburg, Arizona, which at that time was exactly the middle of nowhere. Work, cactus and heat were plentiful, forms of recreation were not. The TV got two channels when it wanted to, and only in the evening after someone hand cranked the balky diesel generator to life. All of which meant that my primary form of escape was reading. At 18 I fled to Tucson where I attended the University of Arizona. A number of fruitless attempts at productive majors followed, none of which stuck. Discovering I liked writing, I tried journalism two separate times, but had to drop it when I realized that I had no intention of conducting interviews with actual people but preferred simply making them up. After graduating with a degree in Creative Writing in 1989, I backpacked Europe with a friend and caught the travel bug. With no meaningful job prospects, I hitchhiked around the U.S. for a while then went back to school to learn to be a high school English teacher. I got a teaching job right out of school in the middle of the year. The job lasted exactly one semester, or until I received my summer pay and realized I actually had money to continue backpacking. The next stop was Australia, where I hoped to spend six months, working wherever I could, then a few months in New Zealand and the South Pacific. However, my plans changed irrevocably when I met a lovely Swiss woman, Claudia, in Alice Springs. Undoubtedly swept away by my lack of a job or real future, she agreed to allow me to follow her back to Switzerland where, a few months later, she gave up her job to continue traveling with me. Over the next couple years we backpacked the U.S., Eastern Europe and Australia/New Zealand, before marrying and settling in the mountains of Colorado, in a small town called Salida. In Colorado we starved and froze, started our own electronics business, and had a couple of sons, Dylan and Daniel. In 2005 we shut the business down and moved back to Tucson. I am currently working on finishing The Devastation Wars fantasy series and attending graduate school.
