Chapter One with Greg Grasso
94 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 8 years ago - ★★★★ - 1 ratingNOW ON iTUNESFor nearly five years, Greg Grasso has been interviewing noted authors stateside and abroad. What started out as a hobby, is now consuming his free time and interest in Spy, Thriller, Historical and Biographical Authors, looking into what makes them tick, how they process information and content, and why they write. ------------------------David Baldacci was his first novelist, and since has led to some of the greatest and most renown authors as Jeff Deaver, Tess Gerritsen, Raymond Koury, Keith Donohue, Sandra Brown, Lisa Gardner, Lee Child, Nelson DeMille, Jim DeFelice and Larry Bond.
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
James Lee Burke—Wayfaring Stranger
August 20, 2014 04:00 - 32 minutes - 14.7 MBIn his most ambitious work yet, New York Times bestseller James Lee Burke tells a classic American story through one man's unforgettable life—connecting a fateful encounter with Bonnie and Clyde to heroic acts at the Battle of the Bulge and finally to the high-stakes gambles and cutthroat players who ushered in the dawn of the American oil industry.In 1934, sixteen-year-old Weldon Avery Holland happens upon infamous criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow after one of their notorious armed r...
Mike Bond - Casual Conversation
August 10, 2014 04:00 - 26 minutes - 12.2 MBBestselling author, environmental activist, human rights and war correspondent, award-winning poet and international energy expert, Mike Bond has lived and worked in over thirty countries on seven continents. His works have been translated into many languages and have been praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic for their intricate plots, fascinating characters, extraordinary settings, and explosive pace.Based on his own experiences in dangerous, remote, and war-torn regions, his nov...
Allan Topol—The Spanish Revenge
August 08, 2014 04:00 - 35 minutes - 16.2 MBCraig Page, the bold and daring EU Director of Counterterrorism, becomes the focal point of an effort to stop the feared terrorist Ahmed Sadi, whose goal is to provoke a Muslim uprising in Western Europe. Ahmed, a Muslim fanatic born in Paris to parents who emigrated from Algeria, calls himself Musa Ben Abdil, after a Muslim hero from the Fifteenth Century War with Spain. Page teams up once again the resourceful Elizabeth Crowder, a newspaper reporter who has also become his lover. Ahmed’s...
Greg Zuckerman—The Frackers
July 25, 2014 04:00 - 23 minutes - 10.6 MBIn five years, the United States has seen a historic burst of oil and natural gas production, easing our insatiable hunger for energy. A new drilling process called fracking has made us the world’s fastest growing energy power, on track to pass Saudi Arabia by 2020. But despite headlines and controversy, no previous book has shown how the revolution really happened.
Nelson DeMille—The Quest
July 07, 2014 04:00 - 29 minutes - 13.6 MBAn earlier, shorter version of The Quest was published in paperback in 1975. In 2013, I rewrote The Quest and doubled its length, making it, I hope, a far better story than the original, without deviating from the elements that made the story so powerful and compelling when I first wrote it. In other words, what made The Quest worth rewriting remains, and whatever is changed is for the better.A sweeping adventure that's equal parts thriller and love story, Nelson DeMille's newest novel takes ...
Andrew Peterson—Forced to Kill
July 07, 2014 04:00 - 18 minutes - 8.46 MBTrained Marine sniper Nathan McBride is the sole survivor of Montez de Oca, the brutal Nicaraguan interrogator who tortured countless souls to death before vanishing fourteen years ago. Though McBride’s body—as well as his soul—still bear the scars from the interrogator’s blade, he dares to hope the worst is behind him.But when the FBI recovers a mutilated body from a remote Utah lake, McBride needs just one glimpse to know the truth: Montez de Oca has resurfaced, this time on American soil. ...
Chris Pegula—From Dude to Dad
July 06, 2014 04:00 - 20 minutes - 9.46 MBFrom Dude to Dad gives you the need-to-know essentials on pregnancy, birthing, and parenthood, and how it’s okay to be scared out of your mind. You’ll learn what the expecting mom is going through during each trimester, how you can be the best partner and dad-to-be, and how to immediately start bonding with baby.Pegula, creator of Diaper Dude, "hip gear for cool dads," here offers a pseudocaveman guide to pregnancy and fatherhood. His adventures in fatherhood and baby gear began with an abhor...
Barbara Hendricks—Lifting My Voice: A Memoir
July 06, 2014 04:00 - 38 minutes - 17.9 MBGrowing up African American in segregated Arkansas in the 1950s, Barbara Hendricks witnessed firsthand the painful struggle for civil rights. After graduation from the Juilliard School of Music, Hendricks immediately won a number of important international prizes, and began performing in recitals and operas throughout the world. A Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, she is as devoted to humanitarian work as she is to her music. Always the anti-diva, Hendri...
Ridley Pearson—The Red Room
July 06, 2014 04:00 - 28 minutes - 13.2 MBJohn Knox is an expert at surveillance and delicate, international dealings. So he is understandably thrown when David “Sarge” Dulwich, his contact at Rutherford Risk, hands him a photo of a transaction he recently facilitated in the Middle East. More curious to him, he’s shown that photo while in the Red Room, the private security company’s highly secure underground bunker, where eavesdropping is impossible and privacy ensured. Why all the cloak-and-dagger?Knox is pressured into accepting a ...
Daniel James Brown—The Boys in the Boat
July 01, 2014 04:00 - 12 minutes - 5.8 MBThey thought he was gone, but they were wrong. Jack the Ripper is loose in London once more.Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad faces the most shocking case of its existence, in the extraordinary new historical thriller from the author of the acclaimed national bestsellers The Yard and The Black Country.London, 1890. A small group of the city’s elite, fed up with the murder rate, have made it their business to capture violent criminals and mete out their own terrible brand of retribution. Now they a...
Jeff Deaver—The Kill Room
July 01, 2014 04:00 - 37 minutes - 17.4 MBRobert Moreno, an American citizen living in South America, is shot in the Bahamas by a sniper. The killing was commissioned by the U.S. government, who received a tip-off that Moreno was planning a terrorist attack on a U.S. oil company headquarters. But this intelligence was fatally incorrect: anti-American Moreno ordered a protest at the oil company, not an attack.Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are drafted in to investigate. While Sachs traces Moreno’s steps in New York, Rhyme travels to t...
Lee Childs—A Wanted Man
June 20, 2014 04:00 - 13 minutes - 6.13 MBFour people in a car, hoping to make Chicago by morning. One man driving, another telling stories that don’t add up. A woman in the back, silent and worried. And a hitchhiker with a broken nose. An hour behind them, the FBI descends on an old pumping station where a man was stabbed to death—the knife work professional, the killers nowhere to be seen. All Jack Reacher wanted was a ride to Virginia. All he did was stick out his thumb. But he soon discovers he has hitched more than a ride. He ha...
David Baldacci—The Target
May 19, 2014 04:00 - 13 minutes - 6.22 MBThe President knows it's a perilous, high-risk assignment. If he gives the order, he has the opportunity to take down a global menace, once and for all. If the mission fails, he would face certain impeachment, and the threats against the nation would multiply. So the president turns to the one team that can pull off the impossible: Will Robie and his partner, Jessica Reel.Together, Robie and Reel's talents as assassins are unmatched. But there are some in power who don't trust the pair. They ...
Jeff Deaver —The Skin Collector
May 18, 2014 04:00 - 25 minutes - 11.5 MBIn his classic thriller The Bone Collector, Jeffery Deaver introduced readers to Lincoln Rhyme-the nation's most renowned investigator and forensic detective.Now, a new killer is on the loose: a criminal inspired by the Bone Collector. And Rhyme must untangle the twisted web of clues before the killer targets more victims-or Rhyme himself.THE SKIN COLLECTORThe killer's methods are terrifying. He stalks the basements and underground passageways of New York City. He tattoos his victims' flesh w...
Dale Brown—Starfire
May 16, 2014 04:00 - 32 minutes - 14.7 MBWith the death of his heroic father, bomber and space warfare veteran Patrick McLanahan, Bradley McLanahan must now fly solo, leading a team of young engineers designing Starfire, the world’s first orbiting solar power plant.Starfire will not only deliver unlimited and inexpensive electricity anywhere on planet Earth, it can also transmit power to the moon, and even to spacecraft and asteroids. It’s a crucial first step in the exploration of the solar system, and Bradley and his team are on t...
Mariana Cook —Justice: Faces of the Human Rights Revolution
May 08, 2014 04:00 - 26 minutes - 12 MBNew York-based photographer Mariana Cook is known for her character studies of persons both in and out of the public eye. Among her previous bestselling photobooks are Mathematicians, Faces of Science, Mothers and Sons and Fathers and Daughters. Her latest collection introduces us to some of the women and men who are the faces of the human rights revolution, among them former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the 39th American President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Burmese dem...
Stephen White—An Informal Discussion
April 18, 2014 04:00 - 31 minutes - 14.4 MBStephen White is the author of the New York Times bestselling Alan Gregory novels. In his books, he draws upon over fifteen years of clinical practice as a psychologist to create intriguing plots and complex, believable characters. ----------------------------Born on Long Island, White grew up in New York, New Jersey, and Southern California and attended the University of California campuses at Irvine (where he lasted three weeks as a creative writing major) and Los Angeles before graduating ...
Peter Leonard—Eyes Closed Tight
April 12, 2014 04:00 - 30 minutes - 13.9 MBO'Clair is a former Detroit homicide investigator who now owns a motel in Pompano Beach, Florida in his retirement. He runs the place with his much younger girlfriend, Virginia, who's a knockout and can fix anything. One morning, he’s cleaning up after the previous night’s partiers when he sees a lovely young woman stretched out asleep on a lounge chair. He shakes her gently. Then he touches her neck and feels for a pulse. There isn't one. Her skin is cold, body starting to stiffen, definitel...
Mark Rubinstein—The Foot Soldier
April 08, 2014 04:00 - 26 minutes - 12 MBRight after college graduation, Costa, a lower-middle-class kid from Buffalo, New York, is drafted into the US army and plunged into the Vietnam War. The Foot Solder catapults the reader back to the conflict that changed America.This is a compelling novella of morality—right or wrong in a split second in the hell of the jungle—when it really matters, regardless of rank, military orders, or rule books. It asks how a soldier survives, how he deals with dislocation, and how he reacts when given ...
Teresa Tamura—Minidoka An American Concentration Camp
April 08, 2014 04:00 - 41 minutes - 18.9 MBAfter the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 — the same year my parents graduated from Caldwell High School — President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942. Roosevelt's mandate confined 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans to 10 internment camps in the western and midwestern United States. Minidoka Relocation Center was one of them.Those who lived in Washington, Oregon and Alaska went to Minidoka, a dry, desolate, sagebrush plain 20 miles northeast of Twin...
Dee Williams—The Big Tiny
April 02, 2014 04:00 - 32 minutes - 14.8 MBDee Williams’s life changed in an instant, with a near-death experience in the aisle of her local grocery store. Diagnosed with a heart condition at age forty-one, she was all too suddenly reminded that life is short, time is precious, and she wanted to be spending hers with the people and things she truly loved. That included the beautiful sprawling house in the Pacific Northwest she had painstakingly restored—but, increasingly, it did not include the mortgage payments, constant repairs, and...
Chris Pan Launois—L'American, A Photojournalist's Life
October 02, 2013 04:00 - 29 minutes - 13.5 MBChris Pan Launois talks about his father John Launois and the part he played as one of the most celebrated photojournalist on modern times.____________________Before television, the great picture magazines captured world events for millions of readers. They sent correspondents and photojournalists to the ends of the earth to record history in the making. Among this elite was the photographer, John Launois. During the 1960s and 1970s, the final decades of the “golden age of photojournalism,” J...
Mark Rubinstein—Love Gone Mad
September 23, 2013 04:00 - 26 minutes - 12.2 MBWhen heart surgeon Adrian Douglas and Megan Haggarty, RN, meet at the hospital where they work, neither has any idea of the scorpion's nest into which they've stumbled. Strange and frightening events begin happening to each of them; someone is after them both--and the stalker is not only brilliant and crafty, but vows to exact revenge for the ultimate betrayal. As things spin out of control, Megan and Adrian fight for their lives.
Allan Topel—The Russian Endgame
September 17, 2013 04:00 - 25 minutes - 11.5 MBWhen former KGB agent Dimitri Orlov orchestrates an alliance between two world powers bent on domination, he unleashes a powerful chain of events that will rock the Western World. The agenda? Eliminate the President of the United States and seize classified military weaponry capable of shifting the balance of world power. But before this nefarious scheme can reach fruition, Craig Page is on the scene, joined by companion Elizabeth Crowder, ready to confront a painful past and the enemies that...
Caroline Stossinger—A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World's Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor
May 08, 2013 04:00 - 29 minutes - 13.7 MBThe subject of the Academy Award–winning documentary The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life, Alice Herz-Sommer was the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor when she died on February 23, 2014. A Century of Wisdom is the true story of her life—an inspiring story of resilience and the power of optimism. ------------------- Before her death at 110, the pianist Alice Herz-Sommer was an eyewitness to the entire last century and the first decade of this one. She had seen it all, surviving the Theres...
William Gladstone—The Power of Twelve
March 31, 2013 04:00 - 28 minutes - 12.9 MBThe year 2012 didn’t mark the end of civilization as many had mistakenly predicted. Rather, it marked a turning point in human consciousness, a shift toward a more humanistic, less violent existence.-------------But not if Arnold Wheeler can help it.-------------Arnold is The Grand Light and Keeper of the Code of the Illuminati, which quietly and covertly control every major development on Earth. He is quite aware of the universal shift in consciousness predicted by the Mayans long ago. With ...
Mark Rubinstein—Mad Dog House
February 05, 2013 05:00 - 25 minutes - 11.5 MBRight after college graduation, Costa, a lower-middle-class kid from Buffalo, New York, is drafted into the US army and plunged into the Vietnam War. The Foot Solder catapults the reader back to the conflict that changed America.This is a compelling novella of morality—right or wrong in a split second in the hell of the jungle—when it really matters, regardless of rank, military orders, or rule books. It asks how a soldier survives, how he deals with dislocation, and how he reacts when given ...
Larry Bond & Jim Defelice—Red Dragon Rising: Blood of War
January 17, 2013 05:00 - 29 minutes - 13.5 MBRed Dragon Rising: Blood of War, an explosive new thriller from New York Times bestselling author Larry Bond and Jim DeFelice.As depression and drought wrack China, the country’s new premier has launched a deadly war with Vietnam. The assault has left the world on the precipice of disaster….U.S. Army Major Zeus Murphy disobeys his commander and plunges headlong into the conflict, leading the Vietnamese in a covert attack against the Chinese army massing on the border. If the gambit fails, Chi...
Larry Bond & Jim Defelice—Red Dragon Rising: Blood of War
January 17, 2013 05:00 - 29 minutes - 13.5 MBRed Dragon Rising: Blood of War, an explosive new thriller from New York Times bestselling author Larry Bond and Jim DeFelice.As depression and drought wrack China, the country’s new premier has launched a deadly war with Vietnam. The assault has left the world on the precipice of disaster….U.S. Army Major Zeus Murphy disobeys his commander and plunges headlong into the conflict, leading the Vietnamese in a covert attack against the Chinese army massing on the border. If the gambit fails, Chi...
Mary Morgan Rockerfeller—Beginning With The End, A Story of Twin Loss
August 20, 2012 04:00 - 37 minutes - 17.3 MBIn1961, Michael Rockefeller, son of then-governor of New York State Nelson A. Rockefeller, mysteriously disappeared off the remote coast of southern New Guinea. Amidst the glare of international public interest, the governor, along with his daughter Mary, Michael’s twin, set off on a futile search, only to return empty handed and empty hearted. What followed were Mary’s 27-year repression of her grief and an unconscious denial of her twin’s death, which haunted her relationships and controlle...
David Baldacci—The Innocent
August 18, 2012 04:00 - 26 minutes - 12.2 MBAmerica has enemies--ruthless people that the police, the FBI, even the military can't stop. That's when the U.S. government calls on Will Robie, a stone cold hitman who never questions orders and always nails his target. But Will Robie may have just made the first--and last--mistake of his career . . .It begins with a hit gone wrong. Robie is dispatched to eliminate a target unusually close to home in Washington, D.C. But something about this mission doesn't seem right to Robie, and he does ...
Lisa Gardner—An Informal Discussion
July 09, 2012 04:00 - 28 minutes - 12.9 MBLisa Gardner, a #1 New York Times crime thriller novelist, began her career in food service, but after catching her hair on fire numerous times, she took the hint and focused on writing instead. A self-described research junkie, her work as a research analyst for an international consulting firm parlayed her interest in police procedure, cutting edge forensics and twisted plots into a streak of internationally bestselling suspense novels, including her most recent release, Touch & Go.With ov...
Susan Hertog—Ann Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life
July 09, 2012 04:00 - 25 minutes - 11.8 MBIn this episode, Hertog discusses her book Ann Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life. An illuminating portrait of Anne Morrow Lindbergh--loyal wife, devoted mother, pioneering aviator, and critically acclaimed author of the bestselling Gift from the Sea. Drawing on five years of exclusive interviews with Anne Morrow Lindbergh as well as countless diaries, letters, and other documents, Susan Hertog now gives us the woman whose triumphs, struggles and elegant perseverance riveted the public for much of t...
Steve Berry—The Columbus Affair
April 09, 2012 04:00 - 25 minutes - 11.9 MBA family’s secret, a ruthless fanatic, and a covert arm of the American government—all are linked by a single puzzling possibility: What if everything we know about the discovery of America was a lie? What if that lie was designed to hide the secret of why Columbus sailed in 1492? And what if that 500-year-old secret could violently reshape the modern political world?
Vince Flynn—Kill Shot
April 09, 2012 04:00 - 31 minutes - 14.5 MBIn the year since the CIA trained and then unleashed him, Mitch Rapp has been steadily working his way through a list of men, bullet by bullet. With each swift and untraceable kill, the tangled network of monsters responsible for the slaughter of 270 civilians in the Pan Am Lockerbie attack become increasingly aware that someone is hunting them. Rapp is given his next target, and finds the man asleep in his bed in Paris. In the split second it takes the bullet to leave Rapp’s silenced pistol,...
Larry Bond—Red Storm Rising
March 01, 2012 05:00 - 33 minutes - 15.2 MBJerry Mitchell is on exercises off the coast of Pakistan when his submarine is ordered to a rendezvous off the Iranian coast. Once there, disembarked SEALs, experts in seaborne commando operations, are to extract two Iranian nationals who have sensitive information on Iran's nuclear weapons program.But while en route, the ASDS minisub suffers a battery fire, killing one crew member and forcing the rest of the occupants, four SEALs and LCDR Mitchell, to scuttle their disabled craft and swim fo...
Larry Bond—Red Storm Rising
March 01, 2012 05:00 - 33 minutes - 15.2 MBJerry Mitchell is on exercises off the coast of Pakistan when his submarine is ordered to a rendezvous off the Iranian coast. Once there, disembarked SEALs, experts in seaborne commando operations, are to extract two Iranian nationals who have sensitive information on Iran's nuclear weapons program.But while en route, the ASDS minisub suffers a battery fire, killing one crew member and forcing the rest of the occupants, four SEALs and LCDR Mitchell, to scuttle their disabled craft and swim fo...
Larry Bond—Red Dragon Rising
February 15, 2012 05:00 - 33 minutes - 15.2 MBMore than twenty years ago, Larry Bond helped Tom Clancy write Red Storm Rising, the iconic techno thriller of the Cold War era. Now he returns (with Jim DeFelice) to start a classic series for our era, Larry Bond's Red Dragon Rising, which imagines the globe torn apart by climate change and its economic and geopolitical fallout. In book one of this four-book series, rapid climate change leads to mass riots in China, and a new communist premier seeks to relieve pressure by marching on traditi...
Jeffrey Deaver—An Informal Discussion
January 26, 2012 05:00 - 38 minutes - 17.8 MBAn informal discussion with Jeff Deaver. We talked about traveling, cooking, drinking good wine, and a look into his creative process, work discipline and some humorous life stories. Jeffery Deaver is an international number-one bestselling author. His novels have appeared on bestseller lists around the world, including the New York Times, the Times of London, Italy’s Corriere della Sera, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Los Angeles Times. His books are sold in 150 countries and have been tr...
Tess Gerritsen—On her career, work ethic and family.
January 20, 2012 05:00 - 30 minutes - 13.9 MBA fun chat with Tess and my co-host, Karen Peterson. Internationally bestselling author Tess Gerritsen took an unusual route to a writing career.While on maternity leave from her work as a physician, she began to write fiction. In 1987, her first novel was published. Call After Midnight, a romantic thriller, was followed by eight more romantic suspense novels. She also wrote a screenplay, “Adrift”, which aired as a 1993 CBS Movie of the Week starring Kate Jackson.
Ridley Pearson—An Informal Discussion
December 01, 2011 05:00 - 30 minutes - 13.9 MBRidley Pearson is a New York Times best-selling author with nearly 30 adult suspense novels and over 15 children's adventure novels published in 22 languages in 70 countries. He has had his novels adapted to both network television and the stage. He has also co-produced and written documentaries for television. Ridley has appeared on the Today Show, Good Morning America, Craig Ferguson, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and has been reviewed in major newspapers around the world.
David O. Stewart—American Emperor
December 01, 2011 05:00 - 27 minutes - 12.5 MBThe author discusses his book American EmperorThis vivid biography portrays Aaron Burr, the third vice president, as a daring and perhaps deluded figure who shook the nation’s foundations in its earliest, most vulnerable decades.
Alexandra Fuller—Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
May 08, 2011 04:00 - 30 minutes - 14.1 MBIn Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller’s debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary fam...
Alexandra Fuller—Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
May 08, 2011 04:00 - 30 minutes - 14.1 MBIn Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller’s debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary fam...