Jon Guenther's Blog

It’s been more than six months since my last post, and I have a simple explanation for my silence. Several weeks ago I put to rest my wife’s remains in a small, private ceremony among family and friends. She lost her battle with cancer after more than three years. She put up a damn good fight. And I miss her so deeply I have no words to express it, which is probably part of the problem as I was ambushed by grief some weeks following her death, and nearly had a nervous breakdown.

Thankfully,...

Rio de Janeiro, December 1954

Warm, blinding rain had transformed the crushed-gravel roadway into somewhat of a swamp. A lone man waited beneath a tin awning, watched the two-story house across the street. He’d been waiting a quarter-hour or so. He wasn’t expecting anyone in particular.

In fact, Cullen sought a dead man.

He watched a light wink off and on twice through the lace-curtained window next to the front door. A minute passed before the door opened. Cullen tossed his smoke and stepped...

Ever since I was one of the targets exploited in a government hack a couple of years ago–I literally got images of my fingerprints stolen off a government server… yeah!–I’ve become increasingly aware of taking steps necessary to protect myself. One of the things I’ve done is to choose the best technical equipment money can buy, and that includes both computers and IoT (Internet of Things) devices.

Sadly, no matter how diligent or even paranoid you are about maintaining your security over the...

[image error]The Hashem Code

It’s been less than two weeks since the oncologist announced a family member “cancer free!” I think it goes without saying this was music to our ears after the more than two-and-a-half years we’ve been on this roller coaster ride of tests and chemo and drug interactions and surgeries and hospitalizations and falls and breaks…

Enough said.

Something else that came with this diagnosis was a terminal diagnosis on my time and energy. I quit writing, tossed in the towel, moped whi...

On June 1, 2018 Harlequin will publish my latest (and likely last) entry in The Executioner Series, CHICAGO VENDETTA. This will bring the count of my contributions to these series somewhere on the order of 34 books, which is better than 80% of the total novels I’ve written. It’s almost a palpable loss when I think […]

Chapter 2 – The Vindicator DEATH AND VIOLENCE had sculpted the man from the young child christened as Nathan Mark Helson. Many outside Helson’s tight circle of allies might have tried to blame his childhood for his actions. In truth, Helson’s very deadly skills had come courtesy of the U.S. Marine Corps. Born to hard-working, middle class, Lutheran parents in Richfield—a quiet and unremarkable suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul—Helson grew up in an environment like a hundred other boys his age. He attended public schools. He had like-minded friends with whom he spent adolescent summers in a tree fort looking at …

Anybody who’s been an independent author has probably heard the catch phrase “content is king.” And just to be clear, by independent author I mean one who has chosen to write, publish, and market their own books. Some of those among that tribe might also be traditionally published, published via a coop, or all of the above. I count myself in the lattermost group. So after having written something like 40-plus published novels, I believe I’m approaching this subject with just a wee bit of informed experience. And in thinking recently about writing a post on book marketing, I decided to …

If you dig into the content of most of my books, you'll find they're pretty tough pieces.

So… late last week I handed in a 50k-word novel in The Executioner series created by Don Pendleton. That makes it at least my thirty-fifth book about Mack Bolan, and something like more than forty novels total of my work in print. While I took this assignment for mixed reasons, some purely mercenary, it got me … Continue reading "Finish Line or Starting Post?"

At long last, our wait’s over! And a wait well worth it in my opinion! The preview would seem to promise everything we Star Wars fans have awaited. So go ahead and watch now. You know you want to!