Michael McMenamin is the co-author with his son Patrick of the award winning 1930s era historical novels featuring Winston Churchill and his fictional Scottish goddaughter, the adventure-seeking Hearst photojournalist Mattie McGary. The first five novels in the series—The DeValera Deception, The Parsifal Pursuit, The Gemini Agenda, The Berghof Betrayal and The Silver Mosaic—received a total of 15 literary awards. He is currently at work with his daughter Kathleen McMenamin on the sixth Winston and Mattie historical adventure, The Liebold Protocol.
Michael is the author of the critically acclaimed Becoming Winston Churchill, The Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor [Hardcover, Greenwood 2007; Paperback, Enigma 2009] and the co-author of Milking the Public, Political Scandals of the Dairy Lobby from LBJ to Jimmy Carter [Nelson Hall, 1980]. He is an editorial board member of Finest Hour, the quarterly journal of the International Churchill Society and a contributing editor for the libertarian magazine Reason. His work also has appeared in The Churchills in Ireland, 1660-1965, Corrections and Controversies [Irish Academic Press, 2012] as well as two Reason anthologies, Free Minds & Free Markets, Twenty Five Years of Reason [Pacific Research Institute, 1993] and Choice, the Best of Reason [BenBella Books, 2004]. A full-time writer, he was formerly a first amendment and media defense lawyer and a U.S. Army Counterintelligence Agent.
Kathleen, the other half of the father-daughter writing team, has been editing her father’s writing for longer than she cares to remember. She is the co-author with her sister Kelly of the critically acclaimed Organize Your Way: Simple Strategies for Every Personality [Sterling, 2017]. The two sisters are professional organizers, personality-type experts and the founders of PixiesDidIt, a home and life organization business. Kathleen is an honors graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and has an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. The novella Appointment in Prague is her second joint writing project with her father. Their first was “Bringing Home the First Amendment”, a review in the August 1984 Reason magazine of Nat Hentoff’s The Day They Came to Arrest the Book. While a teen-ager, she and her father would often take runs together, creating plots for adventure stories as they ran.
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1. Are you a morning writer or a night writer? Morning.2. Do you outline or are you a pantster? outline3. Which comes first – plot or character? Characters. Can’t have a plot until you have characters.4. Noise or quiet when working on your manuscript? Quiet5. Favorite TV show? Of all time? Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Right now? Lethal Weapon or Outlander.6. Favorite type of music? Classical and the Beatles7. Favorite craft besides writing? Jury trials, but that was a good 15 years ago.8. Do you play a musical instrument? Nope9. Single or married? Married10. Children or no? Three children and eight grandchildren
11. Pets? Winnie, a black miniature schnauzer
12. Favorite place to write? My study
13. Favorite restaurant? Fire on Shaker Square in Cleveland
14. Do you work outside the home? Not any more. I was once a lawyer, but now I write full time.
15. What was the name of the last movie you saw? “Allied” with Brad Pitt
16. Favorite outdoor activity? Tennis and downhill skiing
17. Pet peeve? People who make fun of the Cleveland Browns. We are about to get even with all of you.
18. Your goal in life? To write more books.
19. Your most exciting moment? In this order: 1) our wedding; 2) the birth of our first child Katie; 3) publication of my second book—Becoming Winston Churchill, the Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor; 4) publication of my first novel—The DeValera Deception.
20. The love of your life? My wife, the artist Carol Breckenridge.
About the Book:
Title: THE LIEBOLD PROTOCOL: a Mattie McGary + Winston Churchill World War 2
Adventure
Author: Michael
& Kathleen McMenamin
Publisher: First Edition Design Publishing
Pages: 389
Genre: Historical Thriller
BOOK BLURB:
Winston Churchill’s Scottish goddaughter, Mattie McGary, the
adventure-seeking Hearst photojournalist, reluctantly returns to Nazi Germany
in the summer of 1934 and once again finds herself in deadly peril in a
gangster state where widespread kidnappings and ransoms are sanctioned by the
new government.
Mattie turns down an early request
by her boss Hearst to go to Germany to report on how Hitler will deal with the
SA Brown Shirts of Ernst Rohm who want a true socialist ‘second revolution’ to
follow Hitler’s stunning first revolution in 1933. Having been away from Germany for over a year, her reputation as “Hitler’s favorite
foreign journalist” is fading and she wants to keep it that way.
Instead, at Churchill’s suggestion, she persuades Hearst to
let her investigate one of the best-kept secrets of
the Great War—that in 1915, facilitated by a sinister German-American working
for Henry Ford, British and Imperial German officials essentially committed
treason by agreeing Britain would sell raw rubber to Germany in exchange for it
selling precision optical equipment to Britain.
Why? To keep the war going and the profits flowing. After Mattie interviews Ford’s
German-American go-between, however, agents of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch
are sent by Churchill’s political opponents in the British government to rough
her up and warn her she will be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act
unless she backs off the story.
Left no choice, Mattie sets out
for Germany to investigate the story from the German side and
interview the German nobleman who negotiated the optics for rubber deal. There,
Mattie lands right in the middle of what Hearst originally wanted her to
investigate—Adolf Hitler believes one revolution is enough—and she learns that
Hitler has ordered the SS to assassinate all the senior leadership of Ernst
Rohm’s SA Brown Shirts as well as other political enemies on Saturday 30 June,
an event soon known to History as ‘The Night of the Long Knives’.
Mattie must flee Germany to save her life. Not only does the German-American
working for Henry Ford want her story on the optics for rubber treason killed,
he wants her dead along with it. Worse, Mattie’s nemesis, the ‘Blond Beast’ of
the SS, Reinhard Heydrich, is in charge of Hitler’s purge and he’s secretly put
her name on his list…
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