Books
FICTION
The Shortest Road: The Promised Wars: Book 2
In the second novel of David L. Robbins’ sweeping The Promised Wars series, the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 flares off the page, depicting with human scope and historical scale the struggle for Israel’s existence.
Bestselling author David L. Robbins, called “the Homer of World War II,” creates a blazing and personal narrative of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, viewed from multiple characters with empathy on all sides of the events.
Isaac’s Beacon
In the tradition of epic novels like Exodus and Cast a Giant Shadow, Isaac’s Beacon is a sweeping historical tale based on the real events of Israel’s founding—bringing alive the power and complexities of the birth of the Jewish state out of the ashes of the Holocaust.
Bestselling author David L. Robbins, called “the Homer of World War II,” turns his mastery of the historical novel to another defining moment of the twentieth century: the birth of the state of Israel.
War of the Rats
For six months in 1942, Stalingrad is the center of a titanic struggle between the Russian and German armies—the bloodiest campaign in mankind’s long history of warfare. The outcome is pivotal. If Hitler’s forces are not stopped, Russia will fall.
German soldiers call the battle Rattenkrieg, War of the Rats. The combat is horrific; soldiers die in the smoking cellars and trenches of a ruined city. Through this twisted carnage stalk two men—one Russian, one German—each the top sniper in his respective army. These two marksmen are equally matched in both skill and tenacity. Each man has his own mission: to find his counterpart—and kill him.
But an American woman trapped in Russia complicates this extraordinary duel. Joining the Russian sniper’s cadre, she soon becomes one of his most talented assassins—and perhaps his greatest weakness. Based on a true story, this is the harrowing tale of two adversaries enmeshed in their own private war—and whose fortunes will help decide the fate of the world.
The End of War
The war draws to a close, but the fight for a vanquished city–and for history–is just beginning.
In the final months of the war in Europe, the last act of a five-year conflagration is about to be played out. As Allied generals surround the mortally wounded Nazi military machine, strategies are being formed on a greater scale than even generals can imagine.
While Churchill fumes helplessly, Roosevelt makes crucial decisions that will cede Berlin to Stalin and the Russians. The stakes are no less critical for ordinary men and women, fighting to live another day.
From the chaos of the eastern front, to the desperation of a single Jewish man hidden in a Berlin basement, to the burning ambition of an American photojournalist, Robbins animates the giants who shaped history and breathes life into the heartbreaking struggles of those who merely lived it.
The Low Bird
On his first combat mission of the Vietnam War, US Air Force pilot Sol Rall is shot down over the jungles of Laos. Stranded in a valley teeming with enemy troops, Sol scrambles to survive and evade capture. Pararescueman Bo Bolick has been given just twenty-four hours to find Sol before a US carpet bombing destroys every living thing in the valley, friend or foe.
As Bo’s search intensifies, Minh, a young Hanoi woman who entertains the fighters and travelers along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, becomes inextricably caught up in the raging battle between her North Vietnamese troops and the American forces sent to rescue Sol. In the midst of heavy combat, Minh tries to find and understand love for the first time in her life.
But the clock is ticking. A curtain of fire is going to descend. The desperate realities of jungle warfare are about to collide with a warrior’s code that says no man will be left behind.
The Devil’s Horn
Inside South Africa’s Kruger National Park, ranger Promise discovers the remains of a crashed military drone—and a live missile. Immediately, Promise calls her uncle, Juma, a rhino-poaching kingpin and an illegal arms dealer. With Promise’s help, Juma has kept her and her grandparents out of crushing poverty with illicit money.
Alerted US authorities send pararescuemen LB and Wally into the Kruger to secure the crash site. But Juma gets there first and takes the unexploded missile.
This ignites a race to find Juma’s camp and then eliminate the evidence before the missile triggers an international incident. LB and Wally must join forces with disgraced Promise and her jaded, dangerous boss, Neels, who wants both Juma and Promise dead. This tense alliance sets out in pursuit of the stolen missile. But how much will Wally and LB be asked to risk so that others may live?
The Empty Quarter
Every member of the Special Ops US Air Force pararescue jumpers, the PJs, swears by the motto “That Others May Live.” A top-secret mission to save a kidnapped Saudi princess will put that oath to the ultimate test.
With a force of armed men, a former mujahideen chases across the desert of Yemen to recover his Saudi wife, kidnapped by her powerful father, a prince of the Kingdom. The kidnapping turns violent, she is badly wounded, and the PJs are dropped into the vast sere badlands to rescue the princess and a young American diplomat swept up in the plot. The mission becomes a minute-by-minute race between the pursuing husband’s band of tribal allies and the PJs rushing to the rescue, as the princess’s life seeps away.
The Devil’s Waters
A giant freighter in the Gulf of Aden holds secret cargo that could bring down the governments of four nations. When Somali pirates grab the ship, the order comes down: get the freighter back, at all costs.
Only one combat group is close enough to respond before the hijacked freighter reaches Somali waters: the elite US Air Force pararescue unit—the PJs—stationed in Djibouti. Though their mission is to save lives, and their oath is “That Others May Live,” the PJs are battle-tested. The team doesn’t hesitate because one of their own, Sgt. LB DiNardo, is already onboard the hijacked ship.
LB has three tasks: provide intel on the pirates, stay alive until the team arrives, and withstand the humiliation of breaking the PJs’ cardinal rule: Never be the one who needs rescuing.
At the head of the pirates is the shrewd and ruthless Yusuf Raage, a clan leader who will sacrifice anything and anyone to keep his captured ship. The PJs have a mere hour to take down the ship before the Air Force blows it up. Even if they survive the wrath of Yusuf Raage, more secrets and danger await them.
Broken Jewel
For three years after the fall of Manila, 2,100 Allied civilians have been imprisoned at Los Baños Internment Camp, 40 miles to the southeast and notorious for its horrendous conditions. American Remy Tuck, the camp’s resident gambler, struggles daily with his Japanese army captors to keep his community of Americans, Brits, and Dutch alive, as they stave off starvation and protect one another from vicious punishments. Remy’s son, Talbot, now nineteen, has become a man while in captivity. Headstrong to the hilt and a nimble thief, Tal can move like a snake under the guards’ noses and defies their orders at every opportunity.
On the other side of the barbed wire, looking down on the camp, is the Filipina Carmen, a “comfort woman” who has been kidnapped by the Japanese, raped, and forced into sexual slavery to service the Imperial Japanese Army. Carmen battles to keep herself physically and emotionally intact. A favorite of one of the guards, she accepts his occasional kindnesses but has eyes only for Tal, whose fortitude in the face of great suffering astounds her. Tal, in turn, looks up to Carmen’s high window and sees the grace and courage with which she endures her imprisonment. Without speaking, the two fall in love above the encampment grounds.
As the tide of the war in the Pacific turns against the Japanese, tensions and danger in the camp escalate. In the face of all but certain execution at the hands of their captors, Remy and Tal enact a daring plan to save their fellow prisoners and the woman Tal loves.
The Betrayal Game
A follow up to The Assassins Gallery. In 1961 Professor Mikhal Lammeck, a specialist in the history and weaponry of assassins, has come to Havana. In Fidel Castro, he believes the world is witnessing that rarest anomaly: the man who can change history … and therefore must be murdered.
The wild CIA plots, the treacherous double crosses, the near-miraculous escapes, are already legendary. But with a massive U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba looming, a trap has been set that not even Castro can beat. The players in this deadly assassination endgame include organized-crime figures, CIA agents, the Cuban underground, Castro’s secret police, and a confused Marine sharpshooter. And, perhaps most unlikely of all, a distinguished history professor. Seamlessly blending history and fiction into an electrifying page-turner, The Betrayal Game is that rarest of all thrillers—a novel so vividly imagined, it might very well be true.
As the tide of the war in the Pacific turns against the Japanese, tensions and danger in the camp escalate. In the face of all but certain execution at the hands of their captors, Remy and Tal enact a daring plan to save their fellow prisoners and the woman Tal loves.
The Assassins Gallery
New Year’s Eve, 1945. The assassin steps out of the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of a raging nor’easter. Cool and efficient, she’s a weapon of war superbly trained in the ancient arts of subterfuge and murder. And even though she’s outnumbered, she’s got one major advantage: No one knows she’s coming.
Professor Mikhal Lammeck’s specialty is the history and weaponry of assassins. But even Lammeck is caught off guard when the Secret Service urgently requests his help: A gruesome double murder and suicide in Massachusetts has set off alarm bells. It’s only a hunch, but all too soon Lammeck suspects the unthinkable.
In the waning days of the war, someone wants one last shot to alter history. An assassin is headed to Washington, D.C., to kill the most important soldier of them all: the U.S. commander in chief. As Lammeck and a killer at the top of her profession circle the streets of the capital in the hunt for FDR, one of them will attempt to kill the world’s most powerful man; the other, to save him. And between them, for an instant, history will hang in the balance.
Liberation Road
June 1944. The Allies deliver a staggering blow to Hitler’s Atlantic fortress, leaving the beaches and bluffs of Normandy strewn with corpses. The Germans have only one chance to stop the immense invasion–by bottling up the Americans on the Cotentin Peninsula. There, in fields crisscrossed with dense hedgerows, many will meet their death while others will search for signs of life. Among the latter are two very different men, each with his own demons to fight and his own reasons to risk his life for his fellow man.
Joe Amos Biggs is an invisible “colored” driver in the Red Ball Express, the unheralded convoy of trucks that serves as a precious lifeline to the front. Delivering fuel and ammunition to men whose survival depends on the truckers, Joe Amos finds himself hungering to make his mark and propelled into battle among those who don’t see him as an equal–but will need him to be a hero.
A chaplain in the demoralized 90th Infantry, Rabbi Ben Kahn is a veteran of the first great war and old enough to be the father of the GIs he tends. Searching for the truth about his own son, a downed pilot missing in action, Kahn finds himself dueling with God, wading into combat without a gun, and becoming a leader among men in need of someone–anyone–to follow.
The prize: the liberation of Paris, where a ruthless American traitor known as Chien Blanc–White Dog–grows fat and rich in the black market. Whatever the occupied city’s destiny, destroyed or freed, he will win.
The fates of these three men will collide, hurtling toward an uncommon destiny in which people commit deeds they cannot foresee and can never truly explain.
Last Citadel
Spring 1943. In the west, Germany strengthens its choke hold on France. To the south, an Allied invasion looms imminent. But the greatest threat to Hitler’s dream of a Thousand Year Reich lies east, where his forces are pitted in a death match with a Russian enemy willing to pay any price to defend the motherland. Hitler rolls the dice, hurling his best SS forces and his fearsome new weapon, the Mark VI Tiger tank, in a last-ditch summer offensive, code-named Citadel.
The Red Army around Kursk is a sprawling array of infantry, armor, fighter planes, and bombers. Among them is an intrepid group of women flying antiquated biplanes; they swoop over the Germans in the dark, earning their nickname, “Night Witches.” On the ground, Private Dimitri Berko gallops his tank, the Red Army’s lithe little T-34, like a Cossack steed. In the turret above Dimitri rides his son, Valya, a Communist sergeant who issues his father orders while the war widens the gulf between them. In the skies, Dimitri’s daughter, Katya, flies with the Night Witches, until she joins a ferocious band of partisans in the forests around Kursk. Like Russia itself, the Berko family is suffering the fury and devastation of history’s most titanic tank battle while fighting to preserve what is sacred–their land, their lives, and each other–as Hitler flings against them his most potent armed force
.
Inexorable and devastating, a company of Mark VI Tiger tanks is commanded by one extraordinary SS officer, a Spaniard known as la Daga, the Dagger. He’d suffered a terrible wound at the hands of the Russians: now he has returned with a cold fury to exact his revenge. And above it all, one quiet man makes his own plan to bring Citadel crashing down and reshape the fate of the world.
Scorched Earth
The inhabitants of Good Hope, Virginia, haven’t felt the cooling effects of rain in weeks. The crops are withering. The ground is parched. There is no relief in sight. With the town a tinderbox waiting to explode, all it takes is a spark to ignite all the prejudice, the rage, and the secrets that are so carefully kept hidden. And then, in the midst of the terrible heat, a tragedy occurs. A baby is born and dies in her mother’s arms. The child, Nora Carol, is buried quickly and quietly the next day in a church graveyard. It should have ended right there–but it didn’t, for Nora Carol is of mixed race.
The white deacons of Good Hope’s Victory Baptist Church, trying to protect the centuries-old traditions of their cemetery, have the body exhumed. That night the church is set ablaze, and the sole witness is the only suspect–Elijah Waddell, Nora Carol’s father.
Nat Deeds, a former prosecutor and an exile of Good Hope, is pressed into service as Elijah’s attorney. With a politically savvy prosecutor and a vindictive sheriff aligned against him, Nat knows it will be nearly impossible to get Elijah acquitted. But Elijah refuses to accept a plea.
As the evidence mounts, Nat begins to suspect there is something his client isn’t telling him, and the next revelation turns Good Hope into a powder keg: a body is found in the ashes of the church. Now Elijah is accused of murder, and the case is no longer a matter of winning or losing, but of life or death.
The only way Nat can save his client is to scratch and claw for any shred of evidence, even if he has to bend the law to find it. As the summer heat intensifies and passions reach their boiling point, Nat must navigate through the incendiary secrets kept by friends and neighbors, by the guilty and the innocent, to an act of justice that has nothing to do with the law.
The Finger, a novel of love & amputation
Set in the 1990s during the heyday of talk show mania, The Finger is a comic and touching tale of love and the price of love. Here, the price is a pinky.
In southern California, Dante LaBella wants to be a successful novelist. But, he can’t commit to his girlfriend, lawyer and pianist Boogie Gold. He breaks up with her. Then, when good news comes, he begs to be taken back. Dante offers, metaphorically, anything, including a finger. Boogie takes him up on it.
Meanwhile, across the country, Wes Cole, a beaten down helicopter pilot and veteran, lives a loveless life, until he sees Dante and Boogie on a talk show, arguing the price of love. He knows what he has to do, and the result is a cross country drive on a crazy mission to make certain that love gets The Finger.
Part parable, part love story, part contemplation on commitment, love and sacrifice, The Finger will make you laugh, cry, and keep your hands in your pockets.
Souls To Keep
Virgil thought he’d found contentment in Key West with his wife, Ellen. But after four years together, he and Ellen have become virtual strangers. Then cosmic fate offers Virgil a second chance at happiness. The soul of Beatrice, a recently murdered professional escort, mysteriously enters Ellen’s body. She refuses to go on into the Light until she experiences one day of true love on earth. Beatrice sets her sights on winning Virgil for her own. But if Beatrice wins, Ellen loses her body. Ellen is determined to keep her body and soul together and win back her husband. And what does Virgil want? Though he still loves Ellen, he is beginning to fall for Beatrice. Soon he finds himself cheating on his wife … with his wife.
