with Diana R. Chambers
We are delighted to welcome novelist Diana R. Chambers to Omnimystery News.
Diana's second thriller to feature CIA officer Nick Daley is The Company She Keeps (Aventine Press and ECP Ink; March 2013 trade paperback and ebook formats, respectively).
We asked Diana to introduce her characters and series to us, and her guest post today is titled "Secret Agents and Secret Agendas".
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Photo provided courtesy of
Diana R. Chambers
My characters and I have been through a lot together. We've taken each other through the bazaars of Peshawar and Tehran, the old cobbled streets of Paris, the remote mountain passes of Afghanistan — and the CIA halls of Langley, Virginia. We've known love and betrayal and lost innocence. We've served our country and lived to tell the tale, secret agents of the heart.
My first Nick Daley novel, Stinger, begins somewhere near the Khyber Pass when a mysterious covert op leads him into an unusual triangle with a San Francisco journalist and her former lover, an elusive Afghan chief. By The Company She Keeps, Nick is back in Washington D.C., where he recruits a patriotic young agent, Evelyn — "E" — Walker and sends her into a twisted world of intrigue and danger. By the end, both are bruised and battered, but they have survived.
They have been marked, though, by their experiences "beyond the border," and realize that they can never go back. It's a big world, and that's where their stories will continue. In fact, I have to wonder if I became a writer as cover for my own secret passion: travel.
When I was young, I would haunt libraries and bookstores, sniffing out stories set in distant lands. As soon as I could, I began traveling to those places, collecting guide books and old National Geographics. I have a special thing for maps, particularly border areas where the "official" lines drawn don't always align with the true geography. Sometimes the lines on a map are overshadowed by cultural and tribal loyalties that are older and more compelling than political ones.
Compelling for me, too, as I devised the plot for the next in my series. In Into the Fire, Nick joins up with his former agent, now known as Eve, to rescue her kidnapped daughter in a distant corner of China's Yunnan Province. The reason she is being held in this jungly Mekong locale is the mystery at the heart of the story. And thus the heart of my research.
A wild river with parts still unnavigable, the Mekong is its own mystery, descending from the mountains of Tibet through Yunnan, China and southeast Asia. My scenes will take place in the mid-to-upper Mekong, where the river defines her people more than a passport: Yunnan peoples related by linguistics and culture to those in Laos, Myanmar and northern Thailand. During their rescue operation, Nick and Eve will encounter mixed loyalties and mixed motives. In my novel, this will all make for good conflict, the heart of drama.
By now you can imagine that it was no sacrifice to journey to southeast Asia last winter and explore the Mekong region from Laos and Thailand to Yunnan Province. To me, the setting or place is its own character and often gives me an entrée into the story, or new directions for an existing one.
As I had thought about this story for quite awhile, I was now smelling and tasting, seeing and hearing the worlds in which it would play out. I was meeting the people who might reappear in my novel in new guises, new identities. And I was traveling the river on which Nick, Eve and her daughter will flee from a ruthless adversary.
The Mekong can be treacherous, especially when high waters hide its jagged rocks and boulders. The waters were low now and we could see the dangers our captain navigated as he slipped through a narrow channel or hugged a bank to avoid sand bars, rushing currents — or perhaps even a rare Siamese crocodile.
Lives are lived on this river, in every kind of vessel from rusty buckets to cargo barges. I looked for my characters' escape boat, as well as others for their pursuers and various bad guys. I saw great boulders and hidden coves that might offer shelter — or danger. As the story unfolds in summer, I thought of the rain that would overflow these banks of rice and corn, melons and peanuts. But there might still be the gold miners sifting through muddy sediment, the fishing poles and nets, maybe even the banned dynamite. The hillsides would be thick with bamboo, banana, mango, and teak trees … a verdant, electric green that can suddenly turn almost black as steep cliffs of impenetrable jungle press in upon us. Mysterious. Forbidding.
This is the world of my novel, the place in which my characters find love and safety — until everything is jeopardized again. In Hong Kong.
And here I must ask myself another question that goes beyond place and setting: How have my characters and I shaped each other? How do their quests reflect my own?
As I continue with this novel, I'll be giving this a lot more thought.
Until then … to be continued.
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Diana Chambers was born with a book in one hand and a passport in the other. Travel has opened many doors. An Asian importing business led to a Hollywood design career, and later scriptwriting led to novels. She loves spicy foods and the road not taken. Her bag is always packed.
A member of Writers Guild of America, Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America, Diana lives in a small Northern California town with her fellow-traveler husband, arty daughter and brilliant mutt, the best writing partner ever.
For more on her books and adventures, please visit her website at DianaRChambers.com or find her on Facebook and Twitter.
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The Company She Keeps
Diana R. Chambers
A Nick Daley Thriller (2nd in series)
Afghanistan behind him, Nick Daley returns home to confront the enemy within. His target is a spy at the heart of the US defense establishment, and to get next to him, he recruits the man's lover, Evelyn Walker, a young southern woman known as "E". Torn between patriotism and personal loyalty, E experiences the conflicts that Nick knows only too well. The daughter of a soldier, she understands her duty, just as Nick comes to understand her.
He enlists her help on the next case — this time, a threat from without — a well-connected Greek middleman trafficking with the Russian Mafia in materiel suspected to be nuclear. Innocent of the risks, E again follows the path of duty, which leads her deep into the realm of espionage. Too deep, she later realizes — too late.
Nick, too, does what he has to do, and so he is forced to send her into danger — a world of danger, from Europe's grand boulevards to Iran's Grand Bazaar. After all, it is a matter of national security, which justifies anything. Or does it?
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