Tale of the Sica, Book #5
Action Adventure / Crime
Date Published: 04-11-2023
Great-uncle Leon, the most successful assassin in our family’s 2000-year-old history, is back.
It’s 1920, the Great War is over, and the death rattles of the White Russian armies echo across Europe and Asia as they crumble one by one before the advancing Bolsheviks. It seems that Leon’s days with the British Secret Service Bureau are over.
But when a battalion of British soldiers is shanghaied by a diabolical Baltic baron hellbent on conquering Mongolia and backed by an international organization of fascists, Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming, head of the SIS, sends his number-one assassin to take care of business.
From London and Paris to the Crimea, Georgia and war-ravaged China and Mongolia, Leon and his accomplice, the beautiful Countess Catherine von Merenberg, are plunged headfirst into a maelstrom of horror to rescue the British troops and stop the reign of the Bloody White Baron.
What is the hardest part of writing
your books?
I don’t know if this is
a universal truth about writing but the hardest part...the scariest part...is
the fog of uncertainty and intense paranoia as I wonder if what I’ve written is
any good. Now, I have moved on slightly from all that, and these days find
myself writing as if I was the target market. If I like it – and that’s never
easy – then I’m happy.
What songs are most played on your
Ipod?
My iPhone is filled with
a totally eclectic collection of artists that range from Birdy to Wolf Parade. I
particularly like Oh Wonder, a husband wife duo whose music is alt-pop but
perfect for contemplation.
Do you have critique partners or beta
readers?
Other than my friend and
agent, Melissa Mazzeo, I don’t. The few times I’ve been asked to beta read a
book I’ve found that the author only wanted to know how good his or her book
was, not what I really thought. I hate to say it, but I’d probably react the
same way.
What book are you reading now?
I’m a massive Sherlock
Holmes fan and I have over 70 titles (including the originals) on my Kindle.
I’m always on the lookout for new titles and read them constantly. I just
finished Dave Barry’s Swamp Story and find him hilarious. Emily Organ –
especially her Churchill and Pemberley mysteries – is another comic genius that
I can’t get enough of.
How did you start your writing career?
I’ve been writing my
whole life. My first piece was a school play that I co-authored with a guy who
would have given Eugène Ionesco a run for weirdness. I wrote a movie that
turned out to be so bad in its final form that I was never able to watch it.
Advertising copywriting was something I was good at, and it gave me a pretty
decent lifestyle until I retired a few years ago as Chairman of the global
agency I’d started at decades before as a trainee copywriter.
Tell us about your next release.
I’m halfway through two
totally different novels at the moment. One is another tale of the sica that
takes place in Baghdad, Istanbul, and Rhodes in 1840. The second is a return to
the subject matter of my first series, the Roger Storm books, dealing
with the horrors of poaching, animal trafficking and trophy hunters.
About the Author
Jonathan Harries began his career as a trainee copywriter at Foote, Cone & Belding in South Africa and ended it as Chairman of FCB Worldwide with a few stops in between.
After winning his first Cannes Lion award, he was offered a job at Grey Advertising in South Africa, where he worked as a copywriter and ended up as CEO at age 29, just before emigrating to the US. Like most immigrants in those days, he started once again from scratch. After a five-year stint as Executive Creative Director of Hal Riney in Chicago, he was offered a senior position at FCB. Within ten years, he became the Global Chief Creative Officer and spent the next ten traveling to over 90 countries, racking up 8 million miles on American Airlines alone.
He began writing his first novel, Killing Harry Bones, in the last year of his career and transitioned into becoming a full-time author several years ago, just after retiring from FCB. He’s been writing ever since while doing occasional consulting work for old clients.
Jonathan has a great love of animals, and he and his wife try to go on safari every year. They’ve been lucky enough to visit game reserves in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Tanzania, India, and Sri Lanka.
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