China Red
A Caleb Frost Novel
by
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Caleb Frost’s stitches itched. Despite a few hours of sleep after arriving from Paris, he was seriously jet-lagged. His cell phone rested on his shoulder, Irini Constant was on the other end, two floors below him in her store. He was stretched out on his living room couch.
“One finger?” he asked.
“Yes,” Irini confirmed.
“FedEx, eh?
“Yes. FedEx.”
“And then?”
“Three more fingers. In a baggy. UPS,” Irini said, her softly accented voice sultry and seductive to Caleb, particularly in his drowsy condition. He could understand what made Irini mysterious to the men in her life. ”Come on up and let’s get cozy,” is what he wished he could suggest. He feared rejection. Instead, yanking his focus back to the issue of severed fingers, he said, ”How do we know these fingers belonged to Mr. Partrain?”.
“Pinkie ring, apparently. Mrs. Partrain gave it to him for their last anniversary. Still on the little finger. Finger prints from their home and office confirmed it.”
“Those are usually solid gold with a gem of some sort aren’t they,” Caleb said.”So we can count out robbery as a motive.”
“You are tired aren’t you,” Irini responded sarcastically. Almost worse than rejection, Caleb thought, tracing the tiny row of suture knots across the ridge of his eyebrow. His afternoon couch attire was a pair of baggy cargo shorts and an ancient orange and black Princeton T-shirt. The California sun, sliced by his front room’s window blinds, lay like thin, warm slats across his bare legs The image of Mrs. Partrain sorting out her husband’s digits momentarily amused the black portion of Frost’s soul. He often wondered about that dried, crusty, and corrosive part of him. Where did it come from?
“Why involve us, Irini?” he asked.”I don’t see our interest here?”
“It seems that there is a whiff of national security in this one ”
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About the Book
Heroin, called “China Red” on the street, is being smuggled into the United States. Zhou Jing—who fancies himself a fifteenth-century Chinese warlord, is using Muslim Uighers in western China to produce the heroin. In exchange, Zhou arms, trains, and provides security from the Chinese government for the Uighers.
Caleb Frost is a professional assassin in a deep cover, black operations team that specializes in wet work. His team includes two ex-Navy SEALs and a Greek beauty and former New York City escort. Funded by the US government, the team operates autonomously in total secrecy. China hires Caleb’s team to destroy, with prejudice, the smuggling operation in the US.
Zhou’s partner is a brilliant, psychopathic killer—a Harvard Business School graduate named Wrath. He founded the Visigoths MC, a hard riding, vicious motorcycle gang which protects, delivers, and collects payment for the heroin shipments. When matters become personal and Caleb’s sister Rebecca is kidnapped, the team’s task gets messier. It becomes more than an “assassination engagement” for Caleb—it becomes a bloodthirsty vendetta.
“This tornado of a thriller drags the reader into a world of guns, bombs, swords and death and won’t let go.”
-Rob Swigart, Author of The Delphi Agenda
“China Red plunges the reader into a world of evil intrigue and high adventure. You won’t be able to put it down."
-Antoinette May, author of The Sacred Well, Pilate’s Wife,
and Haunted Houses of California
About the Author
Ralph Sanborn was raised in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and earned a degree in psychology from St. Lawrence University. He has lived in several different countries and worked in a variety of manufacturing and software enterprise marketing capacities. He currently lives in Northern California with his wife, Susan, and their two dogs.