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Written by David Morrell - Audio book performed by Corbin Bernsen - Abridged Fiction - 4 CASSETTES - 6 hours

Publisher, Time Warner Audiobooks (May 2003)

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In the tradition of his bestselling The Fifth Profession, David Morrell delivers a stand-alone thriller about a former member of Delta Force-turned-super-bodyguard to those rich enough to afford him. Contracted by a brilliant scientist who's life is being threatened by drug lords, Cavanaugh spends weeks training Dr. Prescott in the art of escape and evasion. Then the unthinkable happens: Cavanaugh's entire security team is wiped out and all evidence points to his client's involvement. Now, Cavanaugh starts a nerve-jangling quest for the truth and vengeance—and confronts the devastating secret Prescott has been protecting all along.

"If you're reading Morrell, you're sitting on the edge of your seat."---Michael Connelly, author of Chasing the Dime

About the Author: My father was killed during World War II, shortly after I was born in 1943. My mother had difficulty raising me and at the same time holding a job, so she put me in an orphanage and later in a series of boarding homes. I grew up unsure of who I was, desperately in need of a father figure. Books and movies were my escape. Eventually I decided to be a writer and sought help from two men who became metaphorical fathers to me: Stirling Silliphant, the head writer for the classic TV series "Route 66" about two young men in a Corvette who travel America in search of themselves, and Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), a novelist who taught at the Pennsylvania State University where I went to graduate school from 1966 to 1970.

The result of their influence is my 1972 novel, First Blood, which introduced Rambo. The search for a father is prominent in that book, as it is in later ones, most notably The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984), a thriller about orphans and spies. During this period, I was a professor of American literature at the University of Iowa. With two professions, I worked seven days a week until exhaustion forced me to make a painful choice and resign from the university in 1986.

One year later, my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, died from bone cancer, and thereafter my fiction tended to depict the search for a son, particularly in Fireflies (1988) and Desperate Measures (1994). To make a new start, my wife and I moved to the mountains and mystical light of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where my work changed yet again, exploring the passionate relationships between men and women, highlighting them against a background of action as in the newest, Burnt Sienna.

To give his stories a realistic edge, he has been trained in wilderness survival, hostage negotiation, executive protection, antiterrorist driving, assuming identities, electronic surveillance, and weapons. A former professor of American literature at the University of Iowa, Morrell now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.