Synopses & Reviews
Headlights off, a panel truck drives by moonlight across an open field, following tracks that have been there for decades ...
Nina Pryce and her husband, Phil Broker, couldn't have more opposite views of the military. Broker's loyalty to the men he served with in Vietnam is matched only by his certainty that they shouldn't have been there in the first place. Nina, though, is a new breed, a decorated and ambitious vet of the first Gulf War. As Nina proceeds along her chosen career path, Broker -- until his recent "retirement," Minnesota's most effective, unorthodox, and controversial undercover cop -- finds himself struggling in the role of patient military spouse.
The driver is a local entrepreneur taking advantage of a decades-old tradition of smuggling and bootlegging by crossing a border too vast and undermanned to be effectively patrolled ...
Incommunicado for months as part of a top-secret Delta anti-terrorist operation, Nina, with daughter Kit in tow, suddenly emerges in Langdon, North Dakota, a town in the heart of the Cold War Minuteman II missile belt. When Broker arrives to take Kit back home, he realizes that the legacy of those warheads still casts a sinister shadow across the desolate north border country, in the person of a damaged psychopath.
Somewhere in the middle of this empty field he will cross, undetected, from one side of the U.S.-Canada divide to the other. He and his cargo -- illegal cigars, whiskey, machine parts, or something much more terrifying -- thus slip undetected across the longest undefended border in the world.
Broker discovers he's been drawn into an elaborate con within a con, made an unwitting participant in a black-bag anti-terrorist detail. But his anger toward Nina for involving him and putting their daughter at risk quickly fades as a larger, more deadly reality becomes evident. With time running out, husband and wife unite with local North Dakota law enforcement to form a last line of defense against a brilliantly simple act of espionage with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Review
"Logan pulls readers through this suspenseful tale with his blunt, forceful prose. His refracted narrative takes you inside the minds and motives of all the characters, good and evil." Philadelphia Inquirer
Review
"Logan tells a compelling and reasonably credible story in the kind of tough-guy prose best exemplified in the work of Elmore Leonard....After the Rain may not leave you any better informed about the threat of global terrorism, but it might well remind you to keep worrying about it." Houston Chronicle
Review
"Overplotted and underimagined. Logan's sixth but far from his best." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Logan does many things well. The beauty and desolation of North Dakota are palpable. The characters are sharply drawn and often surprising, the story is suspenseful, the dialogue is crisp. The nuclear plot is ingenious and its final countdown is a nail-biter." Washington Post
Review
"The reader is confident the coming apocalypse will be avoided, but that knowledge doesn't dampen the suspense. In the end, After the Rain ends up to be a frighteningly plausible thriller, one that hits close to home." Denver Post
Review
"After the Rain has good action, outstanding characters and a fine plot, if a little improbable but, then, so was the idea of two planes crashing into the Twin Towers that fateful morning of September 11th." BookReporter.com
Review
"If you like your thrillers hard [and] tough...then Chuck Logan's books...cry out for addition to your bookbag." Chicago Tribune
Synopsis
From the author of Absolute Zero comes his most explosive thriller yet, which reunites Phil Broker with estranged wife (and Delta Force powerhouse) Nina Pryce in a hair-raising tale of terrorism and borderland security.
Synopsis
Phil Broker's latest adventure hits close to home, when he finds his estranged wife and daughter caught in a web of deception that may conceal a terrorist plot to bomb Minneapolis's nuclear power plant
When Phil Broker's estranged wife, Nina, and his daughter, Kit, disappeared months ago, he wasn't surprised. Nina has a mysterious and dangerous job working for the government, and her work has taken her in harm's way before. Broker sets out on a mission to find Nina and force her to choose between life as a soldier or a mother, and take Kit out of danger once and for all.
At the end of Vapor Trail, Broker learns that Kit has been abandoned by Nina at a motel in Langdon, North Dakota. But when he arrives, the situation is far more complicated than he imagined. Kit is, bizarrely, accompanied by a "babysitter" named Jane, who claims to be Nina's estranged girlfriend. Buddy Yelton, a local legend and hopeless womanizer, has apparently taken up with Nina. But Buddy Yelton is no harmless local--he has hidden connections to the Aryan Nation, and possibly Middle Eastern terrorists as well. And two motel guests are equally mysterious--Broker can't help thinking he remembers them as former GIs he knew back in Laos in '72. Obviously, all is not as it appears--and more than Kit's life is in danger--the fate of the entire Minneapolis-St. Paul Metro area is in Broker's hands.
Synopsis
An effective, unorthodox cop before his "retirement," Phil Broker is racing north to the heart of the Cold War nuclear missile belt and heading toward an inevitable confrontation with his long-estranged wife, Nina Pryce. A tough, decorated veteran of the first Gulf War and renegade anti-terrorist operative, Nina has dragged their daughter, Kit, into a potentially explosive situation, and Broker is desperate to get his child out. But something even more terrifying is taking shape in this isolated corner of North Dakota: the mad dream of a damaged psychopath determined to wash a hated nation in theblood of countless innocents. And for Broker, for Nina, for America, the clock is ticking down because doomsday is closer than anyone imagines.
Synopsis
Logan's most explosive thriller yet reunites Phil Broker with estranged wife (and Delta Force powerhouse) Nina in a hair– raising tale of terrorism and borderland security.
At the end of VAPOR TRAIL, Phil Broker learns that his daughter Kit and wife Nina– a Delta Force operator– are holed up and in trouble in Langdon, North Dakota. He arrives to find that Nina is running a renegade undercover operation involving smuggling across the wide open Canadian border– and that the freight isn't illegal cigars or whiskey, but the components for a potentially catastrophic terrorist plot. Broker is forces into action when the op goes away and Nina gets taken hostage by a mercenary sociopath with a chilling plan.
About the Author
Chuck Logan is a war baby, born in Chicago a week after the Battle of Midway, in June, 1942. He knows little about his father. His parents split up when he was an infant. He knows his father's real name was Utecht, that he was a professional boxer, trainer and promoter in Chicago and that he took Logan as a ring name. According to the family story, his mom was not real comfortable with her husband's drinking and his involvement with criminal elements around the fight game.
Logan's mom encouraged him to read and draw and hoped he'd become an artist. But in 1950-51 she enrolled him as a 3rd grade cadet at Georgia Military Academy in College Park, Georgia. Memories from GMA include one 8-year-old classmate crying himself to sleep when his dad was killed in Korea. He also recalls teaching himself to draw copying Joe and Willie out of Bill Mauldin's classic book of WW II cartoons, Up Front.
Logan's mom decided to move from Michigan to Arizona in July, 1953. Driving during a rainstorm near Marion, Kentucky, the car swerved on slick pavement, went off the road and hit a guardrail next to a swamp. The backseat was stacked with heavy boxes of Encyclopedias and Logan's Junior Classics. The books drove the seats forward. Logan's mom hit the steering column with great force and was killed. He was catapulted through the windshield into the muddy water where he fortunately landed on his back. Battered from the impact, choking on his blood and unable to move, he survived by regulating his breathing to remain afloat until help arrived. Logan carries the crude tattoo 777 on his left forearm as a reminder of that night; July, 7th, 7:00 pm.
He spent 3 years living with an aunt and uncle in Inspiration, Bowie and Superior, Arizona. Then he was shifted to another aunt for high school in Warren Michigan, a blue collar suburb of Detroit. It was the first time he'd ever spent more than one year in a school. He was not allowed to play sports because athletic ability had been his dad's downfall. Obedient to his guardian's wishes, he attended her non-denominational, fundamentalist church four times a week for four years. The night he turned 18, he walked.
After taking the entrance exam to get into Wayne State University in inner city Detroit, he attended Monteith College, part of Wayne State. Monteith offered an experimental curriculum funded by the Ford Foundation whose mission was to expose a random sample of working class youth to a highly accelerated liberal arts program. Wayne State had a nationally ranked debate squad and fencing team. Logan was kicked off both of them for drinking.
He flunked out of school and matriculated into Detroit's auto factories, police rosters and bars until he volunteered for the draft in 1967. (Ethical dilemma: against the war, didn't want someone else going in his place.) In 1968, he volunteered for the paratroops, a sure ticket to Vietnam, and served 13 months carrying the radio for several small advisory teams; mainly in Dong Ha District in northern Quang Tri Province. He went into Vietnam without illusions, knowing it was bad history but in the end preferring the company of those who went to those who didn't. He earned a Combat Infantry Badge and a Bronze Star for valor.
In 1969 he migrated to Minnesota, where he drew cartoons in the antiwar vets movement and finally sobered up. In 1975 he was hired as a staff artist at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In 1985 he started writing. His Detroit novel and his Vietnam novel didn't sell. His hunting buddy John Camp, a reporter in the St. Paul newsroom whose crime novels (written under the name John Sandford) were taking up permanent residence on the best seller list, suggested that Logan back off the ponderous literary stuff and write a thriller.
Logan published his first book, Hunter's Moon, in 1996. He hasn't had a drink in 29 years, is married for the third time, and lives with his wife and daughter in Stillwater, Minnesota.