with David Khara
We are delighted to welcome back novelist David Khara to Omnimystery News.
David has a new "Consortium Thriller" coming out this year, The Shiro Project (Le French Book; late-Summer 2014 ebook and mid-November 2014 trade paperback).
Today David introduces us to the book in a post titled "The Shiro Project: More Facts than Fiction".
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Photo provided courtesy of
David Khara
The Bleiberg Project introduces Eytan Morgenstern, a larger-than-life-sized hero. Part of the fun in creating the character was to let readers believe he was a threat when (spoiler alert!), in the middle of the book, you realize he is the actual hero of the series.
In The Shiro Project, the action focuses on his psychology. From a seemingly cold and remorseless killer, Eytan proves to be much more complex, with a code of honor of his own, and much more sensitive than one could expect. In this adventure, he teams up with Elena, his nemesis in The Bleiberg Project, to save Eli Karman, his mentor, who turns out to be much more than that in a rather unexpected way.
The Shiro Project is the second book of the trilogy, and I wanted to go deeper into the characters, but I also wanted to stick more to historical facts than I did in the first book. In The Bleiberg Project, I focused on what happened in Europe during World War Two, so for this one I decided would work on the experiments led by Japanese scientists in China.
I got the idea from a testimonial I read during my research for The Bleiberg Project. During the Nuremberg trials, a Nazi war criminal said that what they had done was child's play compared to what the Japanese did to their prisoners. I decided to dig into the Pacific War files. In Europe, our knowledge of this part of WWII is more than limited. Movies and TV series have taught us a few things, but it is definitely not something we study in high school.
I had vaguely heard of the sinister Unit 731. Established in Manchuria, this research facility worked on biological and chemical warfare and was destroyed at the end of WWII when the Russians entered China. Finding information about this unit and its leader Shiro Ishii, who gives his first name to the book, is easy, but most of what happened there was kept secret until the beginning of the 1980s. Once you get into the documents, it's pretty clear why secrecy was so important.
I will not summarize here the frightening experiments performed at Unit 731. You can do your own research or read the book. The most interesting, and maybe, upsetting part happened at the very end of the conflict. US secret services found out about Ishii's experiments and thought that the results might be of utmost strategic and scientific importance. It was then decided to grant Ishii and his team immunity so they would not be judged as war criminals. The US feared that the Russians might get their hands on Ishii before them. So, a deal was made with the Devil, with unbelievable consequences. For instance, it is rumored that Ishii worked for the US Army during the Korean War, and members of his team created some of the most powerful pharmaceutical companies in Japan. In Japan, even now, what happened in Unit 731 is quite taboo.
That's for the historical part. But there is also a scientific aspect of The Shiro Project related to viruses and chemical warfare during the Cold War and nowadays. I'll let you do your research or read the book, but while most of us fear the consequences of a nuclear meltdown, a true danger waits in some highly secured laboratories.
In The Bleiberg Project, I used actual facts to create a fictional hero, and a fictional plot. With The Shiro Project, the action is fiction, but the background and stakes are absolutely real.
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David Khara studied law, worked as a reporter for Agence France Press, was a top-level athlete, and ran his own business for a number of years. Now he is a full-time writer. Khara wrote his first novel — a vampire thriller — in 2010, before starting his Consortium series.
Learn more about the author and his work on the Le French Book website.
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The Shiro Project
David Khara
A Consortium Thriller
Reporter Branislav Poborsky is running away from a bad marriage, when he witnesses the Czech army covering up the extermination of an entire village. Saved in extremis by the gentle-giant Mossad agent Eytan Morgenstern, he is thrown into a troubling race to defuse a larger-than-life conspiracy. After Eytan's mentor is kidnapped, he must join forces with his arch-rival to put an end to a mysterious group that has weapons of mass destruction.
Once again, the atrocities of World War II come back to haunt the modern world. What links exist between Japanese camps in China in the 1940s, a US Army research center in the 1950s, and the deadly threat Eytan faces today? From Prague to Tokyo, with stops in Ireland, yesterday's enemies become today's best allies and mankind seems on the verge of repeating the errors of the past. What can a lone man do against the madness that is bound to follow?
