A Ghostly Shade of Pale (The Michael Parker Series Book 2): Under Contract with X-G Productions
by Merle TemplePublish: Nov 21, 2013Crime Fiction Suspense Mystery Christian FictionBook Overview
The divergent elements of a Southern Gothic nightmare converge and occupy the same stage in A Ghostly Shade of Pale where all the history files on a bygone era are ripped open and rewritten. The violent and dark conflicts of a Mississippi in transition in the 1970s unfold as the players find themselves trapped in games of murder, betrayal, the macabre, and the supernatural.Michael Parker comes of age as the tranquility of the old South is shattered by the Vietnam War, civil unrest, assassinations, political corruption, and a wave of drug abuse that brings the first war on drugs to his front door. A chain of events leads him to become an unlikely player in a game of international intrigue and a clandestine struggle for the soul of America. He leaves Ole Miss to enter a world he does not understand as an agent for the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics where he encounters Fredrick Hammel, a ghostly pale sadist and Satanist who suffers from albinism and psychosis. With eyes so red they appear to bleed, Hammel becomes Michael's obsession and tormentor as he quotes the Satanic Bible and leaves a trail of bodies across the South.
Mississippi’s crop duster airfields become launching pads for smugglers hired by rogue elements of intelligence agencies to smuggle guns into Central America and to return with drugs to finance black operations, shaping what they call the "Real America." They employ Fredrick to manipulate protests against the war and as a contract assassin. They realize too late that his loyalties are not to them or to the communists he also manipulates as a double agent but to the voices in his head that speak to him incessantly.
An uneasy and complex alliance between these shadowy figures, organized crime bosses and corrupt politicians form a matrix where Fredrick indulges his madness, slimy Mississippi politicians nurture their deviancy, and snipers ambush Michael and his agents on frozen fields of regret. A deadly game of cat and mouse threatens the life of the woman Michael loves, loses, and finds again as she washes down black beauties with champagne in the seamy Memphis nightclubs of the Dixie Mafia.
Parker, a modern paladin in search of just causes and dragons to slay, is a cop-philosopher commenting on the world in which he travels as he awakens at the age of twenty-six to find that the whole of his life—his notion of right and wrong and of good and evil—was all a lie.
The plan to alter America filters down to and corrupts the system at all levels and claims the lives of those who could never know or imagine the origin of their demise. It all comes unraveled in the madness of Fredrick and the conflicted state police agent who unwittingly becomes the fly in the ointment to machinations he cannot begin to grasp until he is forced to fight for his life and the lives of those he loves against enemies seen and unseen.
