Got an email today from Lucinda (Cindy) Breeding, Features Editor at the Denton (Texas) Record-Chronicle: I’m so sorry it’s taken so long to
respond – we’re transitioning to a new computing software that has made me
develop situational stupidity with e-mail. I plan to publish a brief about
you and your books in this weekend’s Arts & Community section, which comes out on Sunday.- LucindaBreeding
Guess it’s because I was born in Denton… will be interesting to see what is run. Here’s the full release sent by my publisher, fyi: Denton Native Pens Thriller Novels
Growing up on a ranch outside of Denton, Texas is a long way from terrorists killing insurance clients – but author Liam McCurry says the Denton area contributed a lot to his life and his writing style.
Born in a Denton home –“it was quite acceptable in 1925,” the author says – McCurry spent a lot of his pre-school years on the ranch of his uncle W.T. “Tip” Hall, where McCurry was known as R.A. and also as Billy Jim. He and his younger brother Owen got to know cattle and horses and the Texas way of life. He went on to roam New Mexico, Colorado and the world.
“I was surrounded early by Texas men of strength,” he says. “They’ll see themselves in the anger and honesty of my protagonist, Beverly Martin Raker – and no one called him Beverly more than once.”
An avowed vagabond, McCurry has been a U.S. Marine who saw action at Guadalcanal and Korea, a psychologist, a land developer, a sportscaster as the voice of the University of New Mexico and New Mexico State football in the 1960s, a computer consultant, a classical pianist, a TV weatherman, and, he admits with some reluctance, an insurance salesman.
A whole bunch of people get rubbed out in his first novel Terminal Policy. It’s a thriller that blends insurance-industry corruption and international terrorism into an intoxicating 500-page cocktail of torture and death, sex, intrigue and romance, and a few potent shots of Irish whiskey. Five eBooks have followed the initial hardback: Hidden Agenda, Strike Force, Weathered Passports, Blinded by Fury, and the fifth eBook, Into the Flames, released this month by his publishers, Digi-Tall Media in Plano,TX.
“At one point I was with some guys selling insurance to ranchers in New Mexico, where there’s a lot of open land,” he says. “We told them they could make a lot of money by investing a little bit in the insurance game, and we took care of those investments. We never stepped across the line, legally, but I think we crowded it.”
The often-heartless nature of the insurance industry inspired Terminal
Policy, the jacket cover of which declares that “Profit is the game, death is the payoff.” The plot revolves around an avenging terrorist whose group begins violently “terminating” random persons and places – all because they have policies with one of the world’s largest insurance companies.
McCurry was born in Denton but says his upbringing was gypsy like. He experienced city living and country living in equal parts, and spent much of his youth dreaming of becoming a United States Marine. He made that a reality on Aug. 14, 1942, enlisting at age 17.
“The Marines shaped me about as much as I could handle,” he laughs. He has recorded the Terminal Policy audio book, is completing his next thriller Ulster Ultimatum, and has a third and fourth book “incubating.”
Now living in Albuquerque, NM and on the Monterey, CA peninsula, McCurry’s scattered roots provoke good memories of his granddad’s downtown café in early Denton, and highlighted by Saturday movie serials with Flash Gordon, Tom Mix, Buck
Jones and Ken Maynard’s cowboy series.
McCurry’s books are available on Amazon, Kindle, and story-e-books. During April, the publisher has priced all five eBooks plus Terminal Policy at $20 for the $70 package on http://stores.story-e-books.com/-strse-128/%22Store-Special–dsh–McCurry%27s/Detail.bok. . More information about Liam McCurry is available at www.thrillerpublications.com.
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