Tom Inman Author

I haven't been posting much on my author page. I've been busy writing my second novel. It is titled "Revenant Cartel". I will be posting more about it in the days to come. I gravitate more toward X (Twitter) as their is a bigger indie writing community there. Follow me there

What do you eat when you’re trying to write that next great novel? Actually I’m trying to figure out marketing on a serious budget. Juevos Rancheros always helps.

I've been struggling with writing more books. I'm 61 and my first book, Dragon Cartel has sold only 31 copies. Pretty sad. I thought it was good and so did other people. Marketing is the key. Social Media is not the answer because of the algorithms. I'm trying to figure out how to reach the market for my genre. I have decided to continue writing. I'll keep you posted with the progress of novel 2. BTW, I have outlines for three more novels.

Happy Independence Day!

Dragon Cartel is my first novel. I have a short story and two other novels in the works. I write what I call border crime thrillers. I want to try writing historical fiction and military science fiction. I'm always looking for ways to make my books better.

Tell me why you like crime thrillers, historical fiction or military science fiction. Tell me what you look for in books of these genres. Then go to my website and hit subscribe and enter your email address. I will look at the responses and pick a winner. The winner will receive a signed copy of Dragon Cartel.

You can post your responses here if you want. I will also use email to communicate the contest and keep everyone posted about my novels.

HOME | Tom Inman Author Retired DHS Special Agent and now private investigator Jax Jordan rescues a former informant after his tractor-trailer is stolen and begins a journey that leads to a smuggling “Plaza” inside the U.S. The investigation leads to a discovery that two international cartels have joined forces to traf...

I stood on Utah Beach a few years ago. It is haunting. To think what those men went through is painful. Never forget.

I’m going to give away a signed copy of Dragon Cartel. Kind of a contest. Stand by for details.

In case you hadn't noticed, Mexcio just elected a new president, Claudia Sheinbaum. Will things change with the cartels? She was AMLO's protege. AMLO wanted "hugs, not bullets. Sheinbaum has not stated one way or the other what her attitude with the cartels will be. It doesn't matter, the president is a figurehead and has no real power in Mexico. That is left to corrupt businessmen, oligarchs if you will and the Military. It will be business as usual for the cartels. AMLO rejected the Chinese Belt and Road initiative. Sheinbaum has not said a word about it. China provides fentanyl precursors and fentanyl outright to the cartels. AMLO and Sheinbaum are from the Morena Party. The Morena Party is in control of the presidency. Kind of like the PRI was for nearly 80 years. One thing is for sure, the corruption will continue and the cartels will continue to pour narcotics into the US with the aid of the Chinese.

How AMLO Has Fueled Mexico’s Drug War He campaigned on “Hugs, Not Bullets.” Now, he’s militarized the country.

Here's a an excerpt from my novel "Dragon Cartel". This is from the prologue":

Douglas, Arizona one day later
Jeff Jordan wheeled into the parking lot of the United States Customs Service building. His dark brown 1971 Ford Galaxie 500 police interceptor rumbled to a stop. It wasn’t his; the government had assigned it to him. It was a beast.
Merle Haggard’s The Fightin’ Side of Me finished playing on the AM radio. “That was for our servicemen returning home from Vietnam. We thank you,” the DJ piped.
The 429-cubic-inch engine didn’t want to stop. It protested with a grumble and a belch of dust from under the engine block. Jeff flicked his cigarette onto the ground. “Man, I got to stop smoking.”
The Bureau of Customs office was a small gray cinderblock building. In the back, a seven-foot chain-link fence with yellow and brown vinyl strips woven into the links surrounded the parking lot. The fence looked like a folding lawn chair at a Saturday afternoon barbecue. The lot was treeless except for a lone palo verde tree, which looked more like a vast prehistoric w**d than a tree. The building was what five special agents, an investigative assistant, and a resident agent in charge called headquarters, the office, or “the s**tty gray building downtown.”
Jeff launched his six-foot-four-inch frame into the doorway of the office and said hello to Sylvia, the investigative assistant. He grabbed a notebook and a pen from his desk and headed back out the door for a meeting with his partner, Bill Smith, at the Gadsden Hotel restaurant for breakfast. They were set to meet an informant later in the morning.
The Old West décor at the Gadsden Hotel restaurant was getting old and dusty. He glanced at the Pearl Beer sign with Judge Roy Bean’s courthouse on it. The sign on the wooden shack depicted read “Law West of the Pecos.”
That says it all, thought Jeff. His mind raced with the information he’d received the previous night. Jeff had gone into the office to call the informant. He used a telephone designated the “hello line.” It had an unlisted number that did not show the Bureau of Customs as the caller. It was called the hello line because, when answering, one said hello instead of the usual “US Bureau of Customs Office of Enforcement” line. The informant described to Jeff he**in being smuggled to Mexico from the Golden Triangle by Triads and possibly former soldiers of the Republic of China Army. The Republic of China Army was controlled by Chiang Kai-Shek until 1949, when Chiang and other Republic of China leaders were thrown out of Mainland China by Mao Tse-Tung. The informant also mentioned that the he**in would be smuggled into the US near Douglas and then driven up to Albuquerque. The informant said he could meet at the Gadsden Hotel the next morning.
Bill was already at a table in the hotel restaurant.
“What do you think about Charlie Star?” Jeff asked, after he had ordered coffee and huevos rancheros. Charlie Star was the name Bill had given the confidential informant, whose real name was Edward Glenn. Bill Smith had been a tunnel rat for most of his two tours in Vietnam. Tunnel rats were usually small, wiry men who could fit into the Viet Cong’s tunnels to move men and supplies. Jeff and Bill gravitated towards each other because they understood each other. Jeff tended to work on the optimistic side of things, whereas Bill was matter of fact. They both followed the evidence and facts and played off each other.
“Sh*t! I think the info is interesting, but does it make sense? Why would former Chinese soldiers smuggle Asian he**in into Mexico and the US when Mexican tar he**in is cheaper and easier to obtain? The Asian he**in is usually transported west into Europe and then smuggled into the US through New York and Canada. We know the Triad controls the he**in and the Sicilian Mafia to an extent. When I was in-country running and gunning through tunnels, we would receive info from the spooks about underground, and I mean literally underground, tunnels with caches of he**in and weapons being stored for smuggling.
“We never found any he**in but did find burlap sacks with white residue inside. We also found a lot of empty soymilk containers, boxes that hold twenty-four cans. I told my LT they were probably repackaging the he**in and sending it out to be shipped overseas. The CIA, or spooks, as we affectionately knew them, were working hard and heavily in Cambodia and Thailand. We know they set up bars as fronts for listening and observation posts. The Viet Cong did the same thing. Hell, they were probably set up next to each other. I think our man, Star, was regular Army Intel and manned or hung out at one of the Cong bars that gathered info. In other words, he was pushing false info into the Cong while his antennae soaked up info from the bar manager. If he was Army Intel, he would bring us a report on everything he has on this smuggling operation. If he was CIA, which is possible because they recruited right out of the regular officer ranks, he would just debrief and be on his way.”
Jeff nodded in agreement.
“Alright then. Let’s go and talk to the guy,” Bill said skeptically.
They took the old brass elevator to the third floor. Jeff knocked on the door of room 304.
“Sh*t on a shingle!” blared from behind the door. Then they heard the security latch slide and saw the peephole get dark. The door opened, revealing a gaunt boyish-looking man of about twenty-eight to thirty years old. He was five-foot-nine and weighed one hundred forty pounds. He had brown hair and wore Ben Franklin reading glasses. His red t-shirt was sweat soaked, even with the A/C running at full blast, and it was cold in the room.
“Are you okay, man?” Bill asked as he and Jeff stood in the doorway.
“Yep, I’m okay, but something’s not right.”
“First, just calm down, and we’ll show you our IDs,” Jeff said.
Jeff and Bill produced their badges and photo IDs, identifying them as special US Bureau of Customs agents. The first rule of talking to an informant who had info was to make him at ease.
“Okay, cool, man. Thanks. Please sit down. Like I said, something is not right.”
“How’s that?” Jeff asked.
“Before I drove down, I called Shawn. He didn’t answer. I went by his house, and he wasn’t home.”
“Is that unusual?” Bill asked.
“For Shawn it is. Since we work for Sandia Labs, we always stand by and answer our phones or a knock at the door.”
“I’m sure there’s a good reason he didn’t answer,” Jeff responded.
“No, something’s going on,” said Star in a concerned tone.
“Okay, let’s start with the info you discussed last night,” Jeff said.
“Okay, I’ll start from the beginning. After I graduated from the University of Arizona, I became an officer in the Army. Intelligence was my game. The Army stationed me in Saigon. Being a second lieutenant didn’t keep me from pulling duty in bars and gathering intelligence. I made the information drops and would see the captain I was reporting to on occasion. He didn’t wear a uniform and his hair was longer than regular Army. I figured he was Central Intelligence.”
Bill looked at Jeff and rolled his eyes. Bill was always the skeptic.
“Okay, what does that have to do with the US-Mexico border?” Jeff asked.
“Well, up until about a month ago, I would have said one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. I work at Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, which is owned by AT&T. I run the security program there. My job is to know all the employees and their backgrounds. I check all the dossiers of my employees. That is where I started looking at Shun Mooking. He’s known as Shawn at the labs. I looked a little further when I saw that he was being hired. His name came up on some intel in 1976 from one of the bars back in Thailand. One of my squads mentioned him. People don’t realize that on paper the Vietnam war for us ended in 1973, but we were still there until recently. In the report he was observed meeting with what looked like a People’s Liberation Army regular, not in uniform. We could tell the PLA types by the Chinese ci******es they smoked. Some even wore their combat-issue boots, which were a dead giveaway. We later found out he was a chemist. Anyway, he was hired by the lab. I interviewed him a couple of times. He opened up to me. His father is from China, and his mother is from Thailand. Although he grew up in Thailand, he maintained ties to his father’s family in China. Therefore, China laid claim to him, because he was a genius.
“He studied in China at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology. He married a Chinese woman, and they had a son. He claims he was forced to work on a chemical weapons program at one of the military institutes. He said all he wanted was to go back to Thailand and work at a hospital helping cancer patients. He made it known at the institute that he wanted to go back. The PLA took exception to that and pressured him by making life difficult for his family. He went to the US embassy in Thailand and asked for political asylum.”
“Can you give us the Reader’s Digest version and get to the part about the he**in smuggling here?” Bill sighed and shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s cool, man. While he was at the embassy, his family was kidnapped in China. Shawn was granted asylum along with his family. The embassy promised to do everything possible to reunite him with his family in the US. A few weeks after we had these initial interviews, he came and told me he was being forced to smuggle he**in into the US from Mexico and transport it to the East Coast. He told me that shortly before his family was kidnapped, a tall Chinese man who smoked Double Happiness ci******es and had a hooked nose confronted him in a bar. He introduced himself as Officer Second Class Chang of the Ministry of Public Security and threatened him and his family with imprisonment. Two weeks ago, we started meeting at a restaurant bar in Albuquerque. Shawn told me he was grabbed after work by a Mexican and the same MPS officer. They took him out into the desert west of town and told him he would be smuggling he**in. They let him know he would receive further instructions via dead-drops around Albuquerque. The Mexican man with the MPS officer showed up at the restaurant where Shawn was eating. He told Shawn the Chinese man with him was an assassin for the Chinese Triad in Hong Kong and would kill his family if he didn’t cooperate.”
Star continued, producing several pages of written notes and reading from them. “The first dead-drop provided the first names of the actual smugglers he would be working with. Gloria and Candido, that’s who would pick up the he**in from the source in Mexico. They told him Cathy and Eddy would smuggle it through the Douglas port of entry and transport it to Albuquerque, where Shawn would deliver it and transport it to Philadelphia. Cathy is a student at the University of New Mexico and her husband, Eddy, is a truck driver. They would be contacting him soon. Shawn said the plan was for Gloria and Candido to drive a Winnebago motorhome down to Nogales and cross into Mexico, where they would pick up the he**in from the source in Mexico. Cathy and Eddy would then start smuggling he**in through various ports of entry along the southwest border. Cathy and Eddy would be doing the smuggling for now, and there would be others later. Cathy would either walk or drive the he**in through the port of entry.” Star took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“Man, reading this gives me a headache. The second dead-drop happened last week, and I instructed Shawn to wait until Eddy was two days away from making his long-haul trip to Philly. Eddy has a contract with RCA to ship televisions to the East Coast. Shawn has not heard from Eddy,” Star explained.
“So, we are waiting for you to talk to Mooking again before you find out when Gloria, Candido, and Cathy are coming down to Douglas to do the deal?”
“Affirmative,” Star stated. “Yep, as soon as I hear from Shawn. However, that’s the problem. I haven’t heard from Shawn. I can’t find him. It’s very unusual and I’m worried. I’ve got to call my mom and tell her I’m heading back to Albuquerque.”
“Okay, here’s my number.” Jeff wrote his name and number on a scrap of paper for Star. He didn’t want to give him his card in case someone was nosy.
“This number is for what we call a hello line.”
“I’m familiar with the term,” Star said.
“It’s a landline at our office with no ties to the Customs Service,” Jeff explained.
“Yeah, as soon I hear something, I’ll call.”
“If you need anything else, let us know,”
“Gotcha.”
Jeff and Bill took the elevator to the lobby.
“Maybe we should make sure he is careful of his surroundings. He**in smuggling is serious s**t. You remember that NYPD cop, Popeye Doyle? The one that the French Connection was about. He went bats**t crazy over that smuggler from France.”
“He’ll be fine. He’s former Army Intel. He probably has a gun he carries with him.”
Jeff and Bill went back to the office. They never heard from Charlie Star again.

Remember the fallen. They are forever young.

I just published the rewrite for my first novel "Dragon Cartel". I had a better editor this time. I wrote investigative reports for 30 years, so getting back into creative writing was a challenge. I had to remember everything I learned in writing classes from high school and college. Here's the link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Dragon.../dp/B0CNYDLNJ1/ref=sr_1_1...
Here's a link to my website: https://www.tominmanauthor.com/
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Retired DHS Special Agent and now private investigator Jax Jordan rescues a former informant after his tractor-trailer is stolen and begins a journey that leads to a smuggling “Plaza” inside the U.S. The investigation leads to a discovery that two international cartels have joined forces to traf...

HOME | Tom Inman Author Retired DHS Special Agent and now private investigator Jax Jordan rescues a former informant after his tractor-trailer is stolen and begins a journey that leads to a smuggling “Plaza” inside the U.S. The investigation leads to a discovery that two international cartels have joined forces to traf...