Virtual Book Tour and Giveaway: Article 15 (Griffith Crowe Series #1) by M.T. Bass

Welcome to my stop on the virtual book tour for Article 15 by M.T. Bass. This book tour was organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. On my stop, I have an excerpt for you as well as a guest post. There's also the tour wide giveaway for you to enter for a chance to win a $50 Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift card! Be sure to visit the other stops on the tour for more excerpts, guest posts, interviews, reviews, and more. Enjoy!

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Title: Article 15
Series: Griffith Crowe Series #1
Author: M.T. Bass
Publication Date: October 22nd 2019
Genres: Mystery, Romance, Contemporary

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“She was one in a million…and the day I met her I should have bought a lottery ticket instead.”

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Griffith Crowe, the "fixer" for a Chicago law firm, falls for his current assignment, Helena Nicholson, the beautiful heir of a Tech Sector venture capitalist who perished in a helicopter crash leaving her half a billion dollars, a Learjet 31, and unsavory suspicions about her father's death. As he investigates, the ex-Navy SEAL crosses swords with Helena’s step-brother, the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum, and an All-Star bad guy somebody has hired to stop him. When Griff finds himself on the wrong side of an arrest warrant he wonders: Is he a player or being played?

Lawyers and Lovers and Guns…Oh, my!

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EXCERPT:

The conference room was small—smaller, at least by “Big Firm” standards, than the huge public conference room up front used to intimidate clients, adversaries, witnesses, and opposing counsel by swallowing them up whole like Jonahs lost in the belly of a legal whale. Tucked away in a back corner among the partner offices, it was extremely well appointed, though darkly so, in oak furniture and paneling. The quiet confines served as a war room of sorts, a place where grand strategies and hair-brained schemes were incubated, hatched and sometimes celebrated, sometimes autopsied. He knew because Griffith Crowe was sometimes part of them.

There were no windows, which was fine with him. He didn’t need to be seen, and, besides, he was just there to get paid and be quickly on his way. Even in the dim, indirect lighting, he found a shadow where he sat and sipped coffee from a massive, dark mug with Stein, Baylor & Stein gilded on the side, patiently waiting for Lance Baylor to come back with his check.

Lance was a master of entering and exiting rooms. So, when he burst into the room like a starlight artillery shell, wearing his white phosphorous rain-maker smile, followed by two junior associates and a young, very attractive Asian waitress pushing a serving cart with no doubt a sumptuous lunch, he knew his escape would be neither clean nor quick.

“Miss me?” teased Lance, baring his canines. “I couldn’t send you back to…to…where was it you were you off to, Griff?”

“Home.”

“Right, send you home hungry after a job well done. Pull up a chair, and we’ll feast before you depart.”

Lance naturally took the head of the table with Griff to his right. The two junior associates, veritable bookends with their young, already balding pates, red ties, pin-striped suits, expanding waistlines, and leather portfolios, sat on the opposite side of the table.

They all politely smiled at one another as the waitress set their places and served what turned out to be Beef Wellington. After pouring drinks—Cabernet for Lance, iced teas for the empty bookends and black coffee for Griff—she quietly left them and closed the door.

Like an orchestra conductor, with cutlery for a baton, Lance silently cued the quartet to begin eating.

Lance smiled broadly and looked to his right. “Good. No?”

“Excellent. My compliments to Cookie.”

“You know, our friend here was busy freeing Iraq before there actually was an Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Lance said, turning to the two associate attorneys, who frowned at the apparent contradiction. As if to explain, he continued, “Special Forces, of course. What was it you did there in the desert?”

Griff watched Lance watch himself surgically cut his Wellington.

“Nothing really so special,” Griff said, turning his attention to his own lunch plate.

“I suspect much the same sort of things as you may have done here to get your name on the marquee. You know, all’s fair in love and war.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

M.T. Bass is a scribbler of fiction who holds fast to the notion that while victors may get to write history, novelists get to write/right reality. He lives, writes, flies and makes music in Mudcat Falls, USA.

Born in Athens, Ohio, M.T. Bass grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University, majoring in English and Philosophy, then worked in the private sector (where they expect “results”) mainly in the Aerospace & Defense manufacturing market. During those years, Bass continued to write fiction. He is the author of eight novels: My Brother’s Keeper, Crossroads, In the Black, Somethin’ for Nothin’, Murder by Munchausen, The Darknet (Murder by Munchausen Mystery #2), The Invisible Mind (Murder by Munchausen Mystery #3), and Article 15. His writing spans various genres, including Mystery, Adventure, Romance, Black Comedy and TechnoThrillers. A Commercial Pilot and Certified Flight Instructor, airplanes and pilots are featured in many of his stories. Bass currently lives on the shores of Lake Erie near Lorain, Ohio.

Website * Blog * Amazon * Facebook * Goodreads * Twitter

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GUEST POST:

Who or what is your biggest inspiration for writing and why?

“And so my story begins, like so many stories, with a woman.”

― Daniel Defoe

Well…not so much a woman as a young, nubile waitress. Ah, we were young then. I still recall her coy smile; the strands of blonde hair pulled loose from the bun at the back of her head; the strain of her waitress uniform against her slender waist as she reached overhead for coffee cups; the sheen of panty hose against the back of her thigh beneath her hemline that beckoned like a siren to the hormonal gumbo of my adolescence…

She was from the other side of Lindbergh Boulevard, a neighborhood where the upper middle class lapped at real money mansions. I was from West County where the farmlands were being plowed up into subdivisions with exotic names and three model homes to choose from. The daughter of a physics professor, she was reading Herman Hesse. I had just discovered the dark insanity of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 beneath the looming shadow of the United States Selective Service draft lottery—which Nixon ended the year I turned 18. By then, I had moved on to “creative writing” classes, more for practical, romantic reasons rather than any grand inspiration.

After I flamed out of the music conservatory in Cleveland, I followed her down 3-C Highway to the English Department at Ohio Wesleyan University. But a year later, she was gone…for good. Somewhere back East, I believe. Eventually.

Why? Why do we do it? I fell hard, just like Griff falls for Helena. And surely our great love was frowned upon in parental, religious and legal establishments. But it was sweet while it lasted.

And now I’m stuck with all these colorful characters rattling around in my head and the sounds of footsteps behind me…

“Don't look back, son,” Satchel warns me. “Something might be gaining on you."

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GIVEAWAY:

M.T. Bass will be awarding a $50 Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift card to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter after the tour. To increase your chance of winning, leave a comment at a different stop on the tour each day. Good luck!

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