Journalist Liam Michael “Mad Mick” Murphy is back for another adventure. Journeying far from his usual haunts in Key West, Murphy finds trouble south of the border.Here’s the set-up for Michael Haskins’ Tijuana Weekend, just $2.99 on Kindle
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The opening of the bullfight season in Tijuana, Mexico, finds Mick Murphy up against Central American death squads as he tries to help the ‘rebel’ priest escape Mexico and enter the USA with evidence of government involvement in the death of Jesuits and their housekeeper in El Salvador.
With a group of American friends in tow, Murphy avoids getting them involved as he calls on old friends to help him get back across the border.
From the author:
A little about me–I grew up in North Quincy, Massachusetts, and went through the public school system. I wasn’t a student who stood out. If my English teacher in the ninth grade had not told me to put down a copy of Hemingway’s short stories (I had taken it off a bookrack during study class) because I was “too stupid to understand it,” I might never have wanted to read. Thank you Mr. Carlin! In my senior year, I talked my creative writing teacher, Mrs. Shapiro, into getting the school to allow us to publish a creative writing magazine, Counterpoint. Mr. Carlin barely passed me, Mrs. Shapiro gave me A’s! Go figure!
When I was sixteen, Jack Scanlon, a family friend, helped get me the midnight-to-eight weekend office boy job at the Record-American, Sunday Advertiser, a Hearst Newspaper. Those two-nights a week began my education into the world of journalism and politics. What I learned from the men and women on the Record and Advertiser was more important than anything I learned in college. I was fortunate to enter the world of journalism in its gritty days, when reporters came up the ranks from office boy, to cub, to reporter. My early years were like a black-and-white noir movie, no kidding. There’s a book in those early adventures, and someday I expect to write it.
College taught me how you were supposed to put a news story together, but nights as a copy boy taught me how to dig up the facts and write the story.
I left Boston and moved to Los Angeles, where I worked in TV and freelanced as a photojournalist for years. I served one year on the board of directors of the Press Photographers Association of Greater Los Angeles. I also married, fathered twin daughters (Seanan and Chela), and divorced, while in LA.
When I got fed up with Hollyweird, I moved to Key West, where I went to work for Bernard Hunt at the daily Key West Citizen. Bernie and copy editor Vann Trotter forced me into the business editor/writer position and I don’t think I ever had the decency to thank them. The position gave me a unique opportunity to witness the inner workings of business in Key West. I spent more than five years at the Citizen.
I moved to Key West to sail and today I own a 1973, 36-foot Amel sloop. With friends, I have sailed to Cuba four times and flown from Miami once. Much of what I learned about Cuba is in my novels. While I wait for a political change in both the US and Cuba, I still sail the waters off Key West, expecting the day I can sail that 90-miles south will arrive soon. I would love to set a whole novel in and around Havana.
Hope to see you at the Hog’s Breath or Schooner Wharf one of these days.
And here, in the comfort of your own browser, is your free sample: