Peter Nealen, Author at AMERICAN PRAETORIANS

The Gray War Rages in the Shadows

Gray War, the first Pallas Group Solutions Thriller, and Book 1 of Brave New Disorder, is out today. It Was Supposed To Be a Break from War Zones… But Now It’s a New War, Against Enemies Foreign… And Domestic… Chris Grant had taken the close protection gig for a finance guy in the States as a break from the last two decades in war zones around the world. When a coordinated attempt is made on the client’s life, however, he finds that this job isn’t as simple as it seemed. Things only get more complicated from there. The Pallas Group Solutions contractors haven’t been selected because they’ll sit on their hands. As they begin to gather more intelligence, and as the bodies stack up, they discover that there’s more to both the client and their own company than met the eye. They’ve plunged into a world of drugs, corruption, foreign influence, and terrorism. And a secret war that they have no choice but to fight. Available now in ebook, Hardcover, and Paperback. (Audiobook is forthcoming, expected on Feb 9.) *** While my previous thriller series, American Praetorians and Maelstrom Rising have been about possible near-future conflicts (though American Praetorians was near-term enough that it

New Series Incoming

So, I wasn’t planning on posting about this until release date, which is this coming Tuesday, 1/31. However, recent events with Amazon have forced my hand. I’ve been planning this new series of Pallas Group Solutions Thrillers (a couple series, actually) for a while. The first book, Gray War, comes out on 1/31. I already have the preorders for Books 2 and 3 up, as well, with release dates in March and May. However, things have started to take a turn with Amazon. First, the Hardcover and Paperback are up, but not linked with the ebook. That might just be algo weirdness, since both are through Ingram, and I had to adjust the data to match up with the ebook, since some things didn’t save the first time around. It’s gotten weirder from there, however. I submitted a scheduled ad campaign two days ago. I got back the reply that Amazon Marketing Solutions wouldn’t run the ad, because the cover contains “violent content,” i.e., there are guys in an action thriller pointing guns at each other. “To ensure a good customer experience, we don’t allow ads containing images of weapons (including realistic and non-realistic firearms, swords, bows and arrows, etc.) shown

Livestream with Doc Spears

We’ll be going live tonight at the usual time with John “Doc” Spears, a former Special Forces soldier turned instructor and action adventure writer. We’ll be talking about work before and after becoming a writer, along with anything and just about everything else that comes to mind. Come join us on Facebook or YouTube. As always, it’ll be up on Rumble tomorrow.

The Rock of Battle

Today is the day. The Lost comes to a close as war comes to Cor Chatha: The Rock of Battle. It has been a long road since 1st Platoon drove their Zodiacs into that unseasonable fog off the coast of Norway, and found themselves in this strange and haunted world. It has led them here. To face one of the mightiest armies on the face of the planet. *** War Has Come. The sorcerous rebellion within the Kingdom of Cor Legear was only the beginning. Now half a million men and monsters are on their way to invade the kingdom in the name of the Empire. All that stands in the way is the fortress of Cor Chatha. The Rock of Battle. Conor and his fellow Recon Marines have ridden ahead to scout the enemy and try to disrupt the advance. A recon platoon can only do so much against such an army, however. And the army is the least of their concerns. Monsters, sorcery, and ancient evils descend on the Rock, as the Marines and their allies prepare to make what might be their last stand. The Rock of Battle is available now on Kindle and in Paperback. ***

Dec Livestream – James Rosone and Ukraine

James Rosone joins us once again on the livestream tonight, to talk about the war in Ukraine. James has some unique insights on what led up to this, and he’s been digging deeply into what’s been happening. (He also dealt with the Ukrainian situation in his fiction way back in 2017.) We might well get into some uncomfortable truths about the war tonight. War is almost never as clear-cut or neat as the narrative (on either side) would have you believe. Tune in on Facebook or YouTube: While the livestream is currently only on YouTube and Facebook, we do have a Rumble account as well. Once that hits 100 subscribers, we can stream on Rumble, getting us out from under the Google thumb, so go check that out, too. This episode will be up on Rumble tomorrow.

Setting the Stage – Gradients of Warfare

The term “Fifth-Generation Warfare” has been getting bandied about a lot, lately. The YouTube channel “S2 Underground” even did a lengthy video about it, explaining its somewhat amorphous nature. In short, “Fifth-Generation War,” coming on the heels of “Fourth-Generation War,” which is supposed to be largely guerrilla-based, is so low-level that it’s hard to detect it at all. The full video is here, and well worth checking out: However, when you really start to dig into history, you see that while technology and the geopolitical situation might change some of the details, many of these forms of war have been around since time immemorial. Guerrilla warfare didn’t suddenly appear in the mid-20th century, and as you might have seen from the earlier Setting the Stage post on the T’ai Kung, the use of influence operations, bribery, and crime to plant the seeds of an adversary’s downfall from within is just as ancient. So, what if the whole “Generations of War” idea is bunk? In The Handbook of 5GW, Daniel H. Abbott introduces what he calls the “xGW Framework,” which, in his words, “rejects the theory of sequential emergence, and the Generations of Modern War (GMW) school that is associated with it. While

Blackhearts and Alt-History on the Stream

It’s release day for Concrete Jungle, and we’ve got a special guest on the American Praetorians stream tonight. Alex Aaronson is James Rosone’s co-author on the Monroe Doctrine series, and just came out with the first of his alt-history series “Soviet Endgame” this month. We’ll be talking Blackhearts, Alex’s take on an alternate late Cold War, and whatever else comes up on the stream tonight. As always, we’ll be live on YouTube and Facebook, with the recording going up on Rumble tomorrow. (If the Rumble account gets to 100 subscribers, we can stream there, too, making this operation more independent of the Big Tech mafia.)

Favors and Vendettas – Concrete Jungle is Out

No Favor Comes Without Cost… …But Sometimes the Payback is Worth It When a power play threatens the life of a queen of the global underworld, she has quite a few options. There’s only one she really trusts, however. She calls on Brannigan’s Blackhearts. It won’t be the first time the mercenaries have operated in a city. This is going to be one of the hairiest such clandestine ops yet, though. Because it’s not just Erika Dalca’s mafia rivals who are gunning for her. There are bigger players involved, and things will get deadly very quickly. Will any of them make it out of the concrete jungle? You’ll love this fast-paced action thriller, because the twists and turns come as fast as the bullets! Get it today. *** So, the seed of this story has been kicking around since about 2016-2017. Originally it was going to feature The Broker from the American Praetorians series. Then I wrapped that series up, but the idea was still there. It seemed like a good fit for Brannigan’s Blackhearts. I should also note that while Amazon still has not pulled Marque and Reprisal from Ingram, Concrete Jungle is out in paperback on Amazon, just like it’s

Concrete Jungle Chapter 1

Tomas Fiero was nervous. Short, built like a fireplug, and with cauliflower ears and a nose that had been mashed flat more than once, Fiero didn’t seem like the kind of guy who should get nervous. Especially not when he had an HK VP9, three knives, and a garrote under his suit jacket. He was the kind of man who made other people nervous. Something about this setup bothered him, though, in a way that he hadn’t experienced since he’d been a simple street enforcer, almost twenty years before. The meeting place was the first part he didn’t like. He turned in his seat to address the stunning blond woman in the back seat. “Signora, this is a bad place. After everything that has happened between us and Garin over the last two weeks, we should be meeting in a public place, with lots of eyes around.” Erika Dalca, CEO of Ciela International and also the queen bee of one of the biggest and most secretive underworld networks on the face of the planet, was a woman of somewhere between thirty and fifty years of age. Her skin was flawless, her slightly angular face as perfectly symmetrical and lovely as

The Patch

Brannigan’s Blackhearts doesn’t have an official patch. They don’t have an official anything. But after the Burma mission, some of them worked up a logo, anyway. *** The Blackhearts group was easy to pick out. They were, by and large, more fit than anyone else in the room, and at that moment, also considerably louder. Aziz, Jenkins, and Wade were arguing over a war story, specifically who had been where at what time. Childress immediately identified the place as the village in northern Burma where Doc Villareal had been killed, and they had gone into a system of tunnels after the North Korean advisors to the Kokang Communists/drug runners. It sounded like they were avoiding actually getting specific about the place, but this was bad enough. Santelli stalked toward the table, murder in his eyes. Jenkins looked up as he and Childress approached. The former SEAL looked a little glazed; he’d clearly had a few already. “Hey, Childress, check it out!” he said, pulling his sleeve back. He’d gotten a new tattoo, still under a wrap of clear cellophane. It was a black heart, with a fighting knife through it and crossed rifles behind it. “We’ve got a logo, dude!” Santelli was