About this item

It's 1956. A plane bearing a mysterious cargo takes off from a small airport outside Los Angeles and disappears into a raging storm. Nearly 60 years later, while flying over California's Sierra Nevada Mountains, retired military assassin-turned-civilian flight instructor and would-be Buddhist Cordell Logan catches a glint of sunlight on metal and spots what appears to be an aircraft wreckage. His life will never be the same.Logan and his beautiful ex-wife Savannah, plan a reconciliation in posh Lake Tahoe. But upon landing in the Ruptured Duck, his beloved aging Cessna, Logan agrees to put those plans on hold when he's asked to help guide a search and rescue team to the remote, mountainous crash site. The team finds not only a long-missing airplane, with the mummified remains of its pilot still at the controls, but something much more recent and far more sinister: the body of a young man, shot to death only hours earlier.



About the Author

David Freed

David Freed is a contributing editor to Air & Space Smithsonian magazine and adjunct professor of journalism at Colorado State University, as well as an instrument-rated pilot, screenwriter and novelist. A former award-winning investigative journalist for The Los Angeles Times, he reported from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. He was an individual finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service and later shared in a Pulitzer for the Times' coverage of the 1992 Rodney King riots. David's 8,600-word exposé in The Atlantic, detailing how the FBI pursued the wrong suspect in a string of anthrax murders following 9/11, was short-listed as a 2011 finalist in Feature Writing by the American Society of Magazine Editors. "Hot Start" is the fifth installment in his critically acclaimed Cordell Logan mystery series.



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