David Morrell

Title: Blood Oath
Series: Standalones
Published by: St Martin's Press
Buy the Book: Amazon

Synopsis

Peter Houston wanted to find the grave of the war-hero father he never knew—a yearning that drew him thousands of miles from home to a military cemetery in France. He never dreamed that his private pilgrimage would unearth a decades-long secret and plunge him into a deadly labyrinth of intrigue and murder. As ruthless assassins hunt him through the cities of Europe, he struggles to stay alive, but when they murder the woman he loves, he turns from hunter to hunted—and swears a blood oath of vengeance.

Praise

"Anyone who has ever enjoyed a novel by Robert Ludlum, Alistair MacLean or Wilbur Smith will find a tale after their own hearts here. It's tight, colorful, fast moving, and packed with tension from page one. It's lean, clean, and luridly melodramatic—a guided missile of a book. I defy readers not to finish it in a single sitting."
—Stephen King 

“Exciting. Sweeps the reader along!”
—Associated Press

“Morrell has taken a Ludlumesque adventure and pared it to the bone. What follows is a fast-paced adventure that crosses Europe to the Alps and moves easily between past and present. Morrell lets you know just enough to hold your interest, and throughout his writing is crisp and spare.”
—Roanoke Times & World News

Backstory

My father, a pilot in the British navy, was shot down in World War II (on D-Day). As a child, I had fantasies that he never really died. Here, in my first novel of international intrigue, I wrote about my sense of loss and pain as I grew up without a father. The theme of sons looking for fathers appears in a lot of my early work, Last Reveille and The Brotherhood of the Rose, for example. In a way, that’s what First Blood is about, also. The e-edition of Blood Oath has an introduction about my real-life search to learn details about my father. The original manuscript ran much longer but was heavily edited. Reviewers noted how fast and pared down it was. In retrospect, I regret that. Think of this as a dress rehearsal for a much fuller novel, The Brotherhood of the Rose.