Dead Certain: Book Three in the Matt Jagger, P.I. Triliogy, "Three Times Dead" - Paperback

by Gordon R. Ross (Author)

This is the third edition of Book 3 in the Matt Jagger, Private Detective series, "Three Times Dead." In earlier stories, Jagger, the badly wounded victim of corrupt officers from his own police unit, has been forced to flee early 1930's Los Angeles. With the help of another former LA police friend, now a Santa Barbara city police detective sergeant, Matt has set up a private investigations business in that city. Pressures of the job prove too much for his wife, who has left him, and he soon finds himself solving the mob-murders of his ex and others in his shrinking circle of friends. His success has resulted in interfering with some of the Mafia's bigger plans, and the pressure from the Southern California Mafia and crooked LA cops to get rid of Matt Jagger becomes never ending. In this final story of the series, when Jagger's office is blown up, his business destroyed, his secretary badly is hurt, and his landlord's restaurant business is burned to the ground by a mob-directed bombing carried out by a villainous Los Angeles police bomb squad captain, he knows he must fight back...going after those orchestrating all the recent deaths and mayhem. Matt must find his targets, now hiding in plain sight on a small freighter servicing the east coast ports along Central America's shoreline, while they aid and supply the growing Axis pre-war military presence in the region. Jagger is joined in his quest for vengeance by the small band of survivors who have suffered along with him. They head south after the masters of the cargo vessel, once the gambling ship run by the mob off the Santa Barbara...the ship on which Matt's ex-wife was murdered. The small boat carrying Jagger's little band of four is shipwrecked along the primitive Nicaraguan shore in one of the many storms that wrack the area. Slamming into an impenetrable wall of mangroves, Matt's band of two men and two women must battle the jungle, their targets and new Nazi allies, who could be expecting them...if the unlikely quartet has survived the crash and its aftermath...far from any friendly help. Jagger's plans for retribution may backfire there in a strange world where nature and the villains seem to hold all the cards

Author Biography

Gordon R. Ross has been writing fiction and non-fiction for over half a century, first as a wire service reporter and correspondent, newspaper journalist, editorial writer and later as an advertising copywriter and illustrator for newspapers, books, and magazines. With assignments all over the West and Midwest, from big cities to rural settings, his experiences have led to a creative career in semi-retirement as a published fiction writer of short stories, plays, and novels. Of particular interest to the writer are the turbulent years preceding and during World War II, when America and its citizens were just beginning to shake off the depression and discover their country's possibilities and potentials...both good and bad. The fictional anti-heroes and heroines in his works are a rousing mix of human qualities, needs and flaws. Some of his villains and supporting cast are based on real people of the period as well as actual events. Matching the literary pulp fiction tone of the 1930's, Ross writes of tough good guys bending the law but with honorable intentions, up against morally base, corrupt villains with evil premeditation and holding the upper hand while no quarter is given by either side. The third edition of "Dead Eyes," first novel in the Matt Jagger, P.I. Series, "Three Times Dead," is available on Amazon in print, as a download on line, and from Kindle books. Books 2 and 3, "Dead Silence" and "Dead Certain," also in their third edition, are likewise available from Amazon and Kindle. Plus: Finding a home at Amazon and Kindle Books is "Tales from Tidy Vale," a collection of graveyard short stories by Gordon R. Ross. Twelve different parables of people who should have known better... before it was too late.