Magic, secrets, and high-stakes conspiracy proliferate in a military mortuary

San Antonio Express News

March 18, 2018 

Jim “Zig” Zigarowski is an artist, a sculptor of sorts. As a mortician at Dover AFB in Delaware, he models mangled, dead soldiers’ faces into facades of innocence and tranquility. When a military plane from Alaska crashes en route to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Zig feels compelled to handle the postmortem on the first body recovered from the site, that of Nola Brown, whose name he recognizes as a former classmate of his deceased daughter. But when he examines her corpse he realizes the dead woman isn’t Nola. Adding to the mystery, the passenger manifest contains names of magicians who died decades ago.

Zig searches for Nola’s personal effects and finds her charred boots, a wristwatch, a few burned pieces of uniform and a folded portrait on canvas. He is struck by the items that aren’t there — no dog tags, no phone, no wallet. Convinced the real Nola Brown is alive and fearful that she is a victim of foul play, Zig sets out to find her. He discovers that Nola is an artist-in-residence for the Army and travels the world painting portraits of fellow soldiers in distress.

Nola also harbors a hideous secret, so vile that it can threaten the life of anyone who encounters it. Soon, Zig is awash in a government conspiracy that revolves around magicians Harry Houdini and Horatio Green Cooke, who stood at Abraham Lincoln’s deathbed. He must confront Nola’s terrible secret and face his own annihilation.

The Escape Artist marks Meltzer’s 20-year anniversary of his first thriller, The Tenth Justice, and his evolution as a writer is notable. Frequently praised for his quirky, memorable characters, in this novel he dissects them from the skin to the soul, methodically exfoliating each raw layer until he exposes their vital force. Nola attracts trouble, and Zig jumps headlong into the middle of it. Nola is his ticket to the past — a time when life was simpler and relationships were easier to manage. Like a magician, she slips in and out, up, down, around corners, through barriers, and eludes anyone who attempts to hold on to her.

“Zig could live with the maneuverings,” Meltzer writes. “Indeed, he had to respect her for a smart play like that. No, for Zig, the real pain came from what it showed him about himself.”

Meltzer has been remarkably busy the past 20 years. In addition to a dozen cutting-edge thrillers, he has written a series of award-winning children’s books under the title “Ordinary People Change the World,” and hosted two programs on the History Channel. He also helped find the missing American flag that firefighters raised at ground zero, making national news on the 15th anniversary of 9/11.

It was a USO trip to the Middle East six years ago that fueled The Escape Artist.

“Looking back,” writes Meltzer in the acknowledgments, “it seems clear I was in the midst of my own crisis, examining my life and my place in this world. The point is, I believe every book is born from a need, and it was this book that helped me realize the difference between being alive and actually living.”

The Escape Artist By Brad Meltzer Grand Central Publishing, $28

Culper Ring Holds the Key to "The President's Shadow"

      It was an alarming discovery—a severed human arm unearthed by the first lady in the White House Rose Garden, a strange coin clasped in its clenched fist.  From one electrifying moment to another, that dismembered arm drives the plot of Brad Meltzer’s new novel, The President’s Shadow. President Orson Wallace calls upon archivist Beecher White to investigate the gory discovery and to find out who could have possibly permeated the tight security around the president’s home. 
     Beecher is a member of the secret Culper Ring, a small organization founded by George Washington to protect the presidency. One of the senior members of the ring is in a Washington, D.C., hospital fighting for his life and it is up to Beecher to act as front man in hunting down the villain.
     Beecher has other concerns, too. His friend Clementine is dying of cancer and has disappeared after helping her mentally ill father, Nico Hadrian, escape from St. Elizabeth’s sanitarium. When the strange coin points to Beecher’s dad, however, the young archivist is compelled to leave no stone unturned in finding out the cause of his father’s death and, hopefully, identifying the felon who buried the arm. It wasn’t a car accident that killed his father, as he had been told, and his dad’s death now points to a little-known military unit, the Plankholders.
     Soon, another arm is excavated from Camp David. This time the clenched hand gripped a white card with a message written in invisible ink. The disclosures in the hands of the unearthed arms contain coordinates for a secret Navy installation and all of the players—some good, some evil—converge upon one of the dry Tortugas, Devil’s Island off of Key West, the secret home base of the Plankholders. They must fight for not only their lives but for vital information that holds repercussions for the whole nation.
  This is a fun read. If you have read Meltzer’s two previous Culper Ring books, the characters in The President’s Shadow will be familiar. If you haven’t read them, you should. Meltzer’s character development is particularly superb in this book. The author is a historian and his obvious love for historical trivia is not lost in this book. He is the creator/director/narrator of the TV shows Decoded and Lost History. He has also written a delightful childrens’ book series based on historical heroes such as Helen Keller, President Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many other notables.

History Decoded: The Ten Greatest Conspiracies of All Time"

"'History Decoded' explores fascinating, unexplained questions. Is Fort Knox empty? Why was Hitler so intent on capturing the Roman “Spear of Destiny”? What’s the government hiding in Area 51? Where did the Confederacy’s $19 million in gold and silver go at the end of the Civil War? And did Lee Harvey Oswald really act alone? Meltzer sifts through the evidence; weighs competing theories; separates what we know to be true with what’s still—and perhaps forever—unproved or unprovable; and in the end, decodes the mystery, arriving at the most likely solution. Along the way we meet Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Nazi propagandists, and the real DB Cooper.

Bound in at the beginning of each story is a custom-designed envelope—a faux 19th-century leather satchel, a U.S. government classified file—containing facsimiles of relevant evidence: John Wilkes Booth’s alleged unsigned will, a map of the Vatican, Kennedy’s death certificate. The whole is a riveting, interactive adventure through the compelling world of mysteries and conspiracies."*

This is a wonderful book--fascinating and beautifully produced. I couldn't put it down. The photos and drawings, as well as the removable facsimile documents, add richness and texture. Counting down from the mysteries surrounding the Lincoln assassination, to the search for Confederate gold, to the existence of UFOs, Meltzer questions our beliefs in some of the most intriguing history mysteries of our time and presents evidence that just might change our minds about the outcomes of some of the most notorious events in history. The conspiracy theories associated with all ten events in the book will have your mind spinning. 

If you are a devote' of Meltzer's Decoded television series on the History channel, you will love this book. Even if you have never seen the programs, the book would make a great Christmas present for any history buff from age eight to eighty.

History Decoded was co-authored by Keith Ferrell, author of more than a dozen books, thousands of magazine and encyclopedia articles, and former editor of Omni magazine.

History Decoded was published by Workman Publishing, ISBN 978-0-7611-7745-6.

*from Brad Meltzer's website http://bradmeltzer.com/book/history-decoded/

The CIA protects the president . . . the Culper Ring protects the presidency

“. . .suddenly the bullet dropped out through my fingers and fell, breaking the solemn silence of the room with its clatter, into an empty basin that was standing beneath. There it lay upon the white china, a little black mass no bigger that the end of my finger—dull, motionless and harmless, yet the cause of such mighty changes in the world’s history as we may perhaps never realize.”


Those are the words of Dr. Edward Curtis, the physician who performed the autopsy of President Abraham Lincoln.

Every president since James Madison has attended religious services at St. John’s church, a house of worship that sits directly across the street from the White House. When the rector is murdered, Secret Service agents question archivist Beecher White because his name and telephone number have been discovered in the pocket of the suspect, along with a nineteenth-century deck of playing cards. In an effort to clear his name, Beecher and his sidekick, Tot, along with other members of the Culper Ring, jump into the fray only to discover that the prime suspect is one of Beecher’s childhood pals, Marshall Lusk, from Sagamore, Wisconsin.

While investigating the rector’s murder, Beecher finds a peephole in a wall of the church that directs his eye to President Abraham Lincoln’s pew. Coupled with the fact that the rector was murdered with a forty-four caliber, single-shot Derringer pistol, the identical weapon that John Wilkes Booth used to kill President Lincoln, Beecher concludes that the murder is a re-creation of Lincoln’s assassination. Beecher also discovers that the ace of spades is missing from the deck of cards belonging to the alleged killer.

The following morning Pastor Kenneth Frick, leader of the Foundry Church, located a scant mile from the White House, is shot twice in the back. When Beecher and Tot put together the evidence, they are convinced that the attempted murder of Frick was a meticulous re-creation of President Garfield’s assassination by Charles Guiteau in 1881. Beecher and Tot learn that Guiteau had a tattoo of a dagger with a red diamond on it. “Two presidential killers,” Beecher concludes. “Two suits of playing cards.”

Because the current president of the United States, Orson Wallace, had attended services at both St. John’s and the Foundry churches, Beecher and Tot believe that he is the common link to the murders of both pastors and speculate that Wallace is the killer’s ultimate target. Would Wallace’s assassination, like Lincoln’s, foist “mighty changes in the world’s history?”

After assassination re-enactments of presidents McKinley and Kennedy, the novel’s twists and turns take the reader over the edge into an accurately depicted but largely unknown presidential hideaway where secrets are born and honor dies. 

In his latest thriller, The Fifth Assassin,  Brad Meltzer entwines the past with the present through the use of flashbacks to Beecher’s childhood and gradually reveals the lurid backstory that drives Beecher and his childhood friends through a web of political ruthlessness, misplaced loyalties, and ultimate betrayals. As the story builds to a critical mass, Beecher must resolve his contradictory feelings in order to preserve his code of honor.

Meltzer is a student of history and this novel unfolds within an accurate historical context. He brings back familiar characters from The Book of Fate and The Inner Circle, probing their psyches and exposing their inner conflicts, and giving the reader a multi-dimensional insight into their foibles and motivations. His characters are authentic and credible and they beg for a series of novels based upon the Culper Ring. There is never a dull moment and the suspense builds with the turn of each page. The Fifth Assassin is great storytelling, brilliantly executed. 

Brad's Gift

When I think of Brad Meltzer and heroes, The Justice League and Identity Crisis come to mind and I conjure up images of  SUPERHEROES like Superwoman, Hawkgirl, and Wonderwoman (in all fairness I guess I should mention Superman, Cyborg, and Batman). But Meltzer’s latest book, Heroes for My Daughter (Harper Collins, April 10, 2012, $19.95), isn’t comprised of fictional heroes—it’s cut from the real thing.

Meltzer has assembled the remarkable stories of fifty-five exceptional people. These accounts are not about individuals of great wealth or enormous power. They are not about people who are driven by political ambitions or who seek personal fame. They are stories of people with indefatigable will, perseverance, and selfless pursuit of the things that are good and right in our world. These are people with limitless inner strength and the courage to stand up for what they believe. They are the very people that Meltzer wanted his newborn daughter to emulate—individuals who embody strength, compassion, ingenuity, empathy, creativity, and perseverance

In his heartwarming introduction Meltzer tells his newborn infant girl, “I didn’t want just one thing for you. I wanted everything. If you needed strength, I wanted you to be strong. If you saw someone hurting, I wanted you to find the compassion to help. If there was a problem, big or small, that no one could solve, I wanted you to have every available skill—ingenuity, empathy, creativity, perseverance—so you could attack that problem in a way that no one else on this entire planet had ever fathomed. And that would be your greatest gift, Lila: That no one—and I mean no one—would ever be exactly you.”

Meltzer tells us why Agatha Christie changed his life. He lets us know the reason why Carol Burnett tugs her ear lobe at the end of each of her performances. He inspires us with the story of Helen Keller (did you know that she graduated Cum laude from Radcliffe and wrote twelve books?). His most poignant vignettes, however, are portraits of the women who have played the most important roles in his life—his wife, his mother, his grandmother, and Sheila Spicer, his ninth grade English teacher.

We need role models for our children. We need role models for ourselves, too. That’s the beauty of Brad Meltzer’s new book—it’s a childrens’ book for adults and an adults’ book for children. He even leaves space in the back for his readers to record the recollections of their heroes.

Meltzer said it best in Identity Crisis. “One of the things I cared most about was letting the reader feel that all of the heroes’ stories—all of them—happened in a shared universe. They’re legends in a complex, interconnected world—the tapestry of continuity that ties our own lives together.”

Thank you, Brad, for your inspirational gift. You’re my superhero.

Always be nice to the fat kid

The imminent birth of his first-born child was not a good time for brand new parent, Brad Meltzer, to get stuck at a red light. As he waited for traffic to resume, he considered the universal question—who and what will my child grow up to be?

“It’s a moment where there are no limits or detours or any of the restrictions that reality eventually brings,” writes New York Times best-selling author, Brad Meltzer, in his new work of non-fiction, Heroes for my Son. “And it was in that moment of unbridled love and pure naïveté that this book was born.”

Meltzer started working on his book that very night and listed two fundamental requirements for his son to become a “good man.” They were: love God, and be nice to the fat kid in school.

One of the author’s favorite stories is about the perseverance of the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. In anticipation of their plane crashing, every day they brought with them materials to patch it up. Over and over the duo would crash and rebuild, crash and rebuild until, finally, their little plane conquered gravity and flew, unassisted, above the earth. They refused to give up until they realized success.

Meltzer hand-picked a collection of 52 heroes—men and women—who best exemplify the qualities of “character and honesty, leadership and humility, tenacity and dignity.” He included black and white photographs and brief vignettes of lesser-known moments in the lives of extraordinary individuals that illustrate their exceptional accomplishments.

So who are Brad Meltzer’s heroes? You are, no doubt, familiar with many of them: Amelia Earhart, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Theresa, Abraham Lincoln, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Others are more obscure: Frank Shankwitz, Jiep Gies, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Dan West. All of them are fascinating.

There is no universal agreement as to the qualities requisite for designation as a hero. Dr. Scott LaBarge, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Santa Clara University, believes that all of us need heroes “first and foremost because our heroes help define the limits of our aspirations. We largely define our ideals by the heroes we choose, and our ideals—things like courage, honor, and justice—largely define us.”

The state of Texas can learn a valuable lesson from Brad Meltzer’s collection of heroes. The Board of Education in this state has ousted Thomas Jefferson, Ted Kennedy, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, and Copernicus, among others, from its social studies text books. Who will replace these time-honored, respected champions of history?

Heroes for My Son is a treasure. Meltzer writes in his introduction, “There are thousands of heroes. And I think that’s what I like best. This isn’t about how to be remembered—it’s a book about how to live our lives, and what we are capable of on our very best days.”

Brad Meltzer, the school children of Texas need your heroes.

Out with the old, in with the new? Not so fast!

My husband, John, and I have a long-standing tradition of celebrating the Christmas holidays at home with our brood of five. Over the past few years the kids have married, procreated, and settled down all over the country. To get even one or two of them to land in one place at one time has become an impossible feat. When we discovered that three of our grown children would be congregating in the New Orleans area for part of the Christmas holidays we decided that this was a road trip we couldn’t miss.

Obviously, as a book critic and writer, I love to read. We are a family of readers and we love to travel. Road trips and audio books are made for each other. On our way out of town we stopped at our local bookstore and surveyed their inventory of audio books. A really good one, preferably a thriller, was an absolute necessity to temper the miles and miles of Interstate highway. Brad Meltzer’s first novel, The Tenth Justice, a book that we both read and enjoyed more than ten years ago was our mutual pick. Sorry Brad, but we have consumed more books than hamburgers during the past ten or twelve years and our memories of the characters and plot had become rather thin.

We were half way through David Sedaris’ latest release, Engulfed in Flames, and the remainder of that audio book accompanied us to Baton Rouge. While the first half of Engulfed in Flames was funny and clever, the second half of the book proved repetitious and laborious. I’m happy that Sedaris was able to kick the habit, but three hours of tired ramblings about his 90 day junket to Japan to go cold turkey off of cigarettes was annoying and downright boring. Nevertheless, we listened, hoping that the author would get off the subject. What a disappointment.

The Tenth Justice and its addictive plot captured our full attention on the nine hour trip home. Even though memories of the characters and story line began coming back we weren’t bored or disappointed. This thriller has all the right elements—Supreme Court intrigue, the fragility of long-standing friendships, a plot with more twists and turns than we encountered on the highway, and, of course, romance. Scott Brick, who has also read the unabridged versions of Meltzer’s The First Counsel, The Millionaires, The Zero Game, and The Book of Fate, held our attention with his engaging voice. The 13 CD’s, however, represented fourteen hours of playing time. We turned into our driveway at nightfall in the middle of a romantic interlude between protagonist Ben Addison and his co-worker Lisa, bailed out of the car, and raced inside to our home office/library. John pounced on the book and we spent the remainder of the night taking turns reading out loud until we finished the last page. Now that’s a good book!

Superman holds the truth in Brad Meltzer's "The Book of Lies"

Book of Lies
By Brad Meltzer
Grand Central, $25.99

This review appeared in the San Antonio Express News on Sunday, September 7, 2008

According to the fourth chapter of Genesis, Cain and Abel were the first children born of Adam and Eve. Cain killed his brother Abel and in doing so unleashed murder upon the world. God forgave Cain and marked him with a sign that protected him from enduring the same fate as his brother Abel, and Cain was left to wander the earth for all of time. The Bible does not reveal the weapon used by Cain to kill Abel, and it has been speculated that the armament could have been a rock or a jaw bone or horn of an animal.

In 1932, Mitchell Siegel was murdered with a hand gun. Consumed with grief, his son Jerry created an immortal, bullet-proof superhero, "Superman." To this day, the murder of Mitchell Siegel has never been solved.

So how could the murders of Abel and Mitchell Siegel possibly be related? This is the mystery at the core of Brad Meltzer's new thriller, The Book of Lies.

Nineteen years ago, Lloyd Harper accidently killed his wife as his 9-year-old son Cal watched, losing both his mother and his innocence. Harper served eight years in prison and Cal never laid eyes upon him again — until one extraordinary night when Cal, a rescuer of the homeless, and his co-worker Roosevelt, a defrocked Methodist pastor, discover Lloyd Harper bleeding from a gunshot wound in a public park.

In their excitement of stumbling upon Cal's father and transporting him to a hospital, the two good Samaritans fail to notice the evil zealot Ellis and his Caanan dog Benoni closely observing them from the security of his phony police car.

While his long-lost father is receiving treatment in the emergency room, Cal rifles through his bloody, discarded clothing and finds a commercial driver's license and a bill of lading for an unspecified shipment to be picked up at the Port of Miami. Cal, an ex-agent for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, calls a former buddy from ICE and they plot to intercept the shipment. Little do they realize that this particular cargo is destined to change the course of history.

Meltzer deftly weaves a story of suspense and intrigue as he connects the dots between the biblical murder of Abel by Cain and the unsolved homicide of Mitchell Siegel, father of the creator of "Superman." The relationship between these two seemingly unrelated events is presumed to be revealed in the shipment that Lloyd Harper is to pick up at the Miami Port, a shipment that holds the world's greatest secret, The Book of Lies.

The only real truth would come from ripping open Lloyd's shipment. It was no different a century ago with Mitchell Siegel. No different than with Adam and Cain. It was the first truth in the Book of Lies: In the chosen families, the son was always far more dangerous than the father."
Thus begins the race for the world's most glorious treasure — a pursuit cleverly orchestrated by an anonymous prophet for a prize speculated to be hidden in the Book of Lies, a cache reputed to hold the weapon used by Cain to kill Abel and to also harbor the secret of immortality.
As characters pop out of the woodwork, Meltzer seamlessly weaves them into the plot. And all the while the evil Ellis is one step behind them, strewing debris from murder and mayhem in his relentless attempts to hijack the Book of Lies.

In their pursuit of treasure, all of the players rush to Cleveland to the modest former home of Jerry Siegel, creator of the ultimate superhero, Superman. But the journey doesn't end there. The quest becomes a personal odyssey for Cal, a search not only for the Book of Lies, but an examination of the truth upon which he has based his life.

Meltzer writes in the foreward of his novel, "Every writer has a story they've been waiting their whole life to tell. This is mine. The book is fiction, but it is based on fact. Most important, ‘The Book of Lies' isn't just a thriller about hero and villain. It's a story about us — the idea that all of us, in all our ordinariness, can change the world. The best stories are the ones we believe in. This is one I hope will challenge your beliefs."

Meltzer does challenge his readers’ beliefs and he never lets his audience down in this clever, intriguing new thriller, The Book of Lies. . .or should it be called The Book of Truth?

Meltzer’s book tour will take him to Austin on September12, Dallas on September 15, and Houston on September 16. Details are on his web site, bradmeltzer.com. A companion soundtrack to The Book of Lies is available for download at iTunes and Amazon.com.