Three Weeks in Winter by Joseph LeValley

Winter is frigid, but fear is just as numbing, and death is the coldest of all…

Welcome to one of the November 24th stops on the blog tour for Three Weeks in Winter by Joseph LeValley with Silver Dagger Book Tours (schedule linked.) Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for more spotlights, reviews, and a giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.

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About the Book

Three Weeks in Winter
Tony Harrington Book Six
by Joseph LeValley

Published 21 November 2023
BookPress Publishing

Genre: Mystery, Thriller
Page Count: 376
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

Winter is frigid, but fear is just as numbing, and death is the coldest of all…

A rural deputy sheriff’s suspicious death in Chicago draws small-town reporter Tony Harrington to the Windy City to investigate. Within days he discovers facts the police either missed or chose to ignore – facts that lead him to a white supremacist militia that calls itself The Patriots of Victory One.

In a dangerous and foolhardy late-night incursion into the POVO camp, Tony finds evidence of an impending attack of incomprehensible scale and cruelty. To make matters worse, POVO and its plans may be funded by one of America’s greatest enemies.

Tony and his girlfriend, actress Darcy Gillson, face multiple threats in their efforts to expose and stop the POVO plot. What they learn grips their hearts in a fear as dark and as cold as a winter night in the Midwest. Though the FBI, the CIA, and the military mobilize to respond, the safety of thousands may rely on the courage and determination of a handful of civilians. The countdown has started as they race to prevent the deadly strike that could be fatal to everything we hold dear.

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The Biggest Voices in Thriller Fiction Love the Latest Tony Harrinton Adventure!

James Rollins, # 1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Tides of Fire:
“Joseph LeValley’s THREE WEEKS IN WINTER is a tour-de-force of international thrillers, a brutal and twisty tale of arm’s dealers and terrorists both here and abroad. So many times, my jaw literally dropped at the surprising revelations and throat-clutching moments of suspense. More people need to be reading LeValley. Like right now.”

Max Allan Collins, bestselling author of Road to Perdition: 
 “Joseph LeValley is one of the best writers of suspense around. Don’t miss his latest thriller!”

Entrada Books: 
With his fast-paced writing style and descriptive prose, author Joseph LeValley is once again capturing readers’ attention with his latest Tony Harrington thriller. From small towns to large cities, the author shows us how a few dangerous people can threaten everything we hold dear. Get ready for an exciting page-turning ride as you settle in with Three Weeks in Winter.

From an expert in the real world, Col. John M. Hinck (Ret.), PhD, Assistant Professor of Leadership, US Air Force Air University:
GREAT book!  Superb characters, believable conflict, intrigue, romance, suspense, and depth amid plots, twists, and turns — written in a Tom Clancy-style. This has all the elements of a great novel —  a thrillful page-turner!

From Dave Elbert, Author of The Elbert Files:
LeValley’s sixth novel about Iowa newspaper reporter Tony Harrington is another page-turner that kept me reading long after my bedtime.

Excerpt

Even before the body completed its plummet to the pavement far below, Tenisha Wedder decided the police would never know what she knew.

The man was dead, or soon would be. Tenisha was a nurse, so she knew this without question. Her apartment was on the sixth floor. The man had fallen from above—just a flash of white skin and green parka, glimpsed as it fell past the window. A fall of seven stories or more, unimpeded, to a cold expanse of concrete was a death sentence.

The lucky ones died instantly. The less fortunate survived for a short time, in various states of consciousness and degrees of agony. In the end, they all died. Wedder had worked too many twelve-hour shifts in hospital emergency rooms to believe the man had any chance of survival.

Knowing this eased her guilt a little as she continued to rock Fobe. She couldn’t save the stranger, so it wouldn’t matter if she waited until someone else found the body. When the police and EMTs arrived, if Fobe was sound asleep by then, she would venture down to the street to feign curiosity about the gathering emergency vehicles and to offer her assistance.

Her ability to turn her back on the victim now, and her reluctance to tell the police what she had seen earlier, were not a result of callousness. Her years of caring for the victims of tragedy and malice had not made her callous. It also was not the result of cowardice. Growing up on the south side of Chicago and living as a single mother in the heart of the city had made her anything but a coward.

The source of her resolve to stay away was curled up in her lap. Fobe changed everything. Having a one-year-old son to raise, to nurture, to protect, forced her to set aside any crusader impulses and think first of what was best for him.

Fobe’s first smile, just hours after his birth, had awakened in her a depth of love and devotion she didn’t know she could feel for anyone. It also aroused powerful maternal anxieties. Her profession had taught her firsthand how dangerous and cruel the world could be. She could not bear the thought of this precious child being placed in the path of any of those horrors. Avoiding trouble for the sake of her son did not make her a coward; it made her a strong and loving mother.

So she would not allow herself to be listed on the police report as a key witness. She would not be describing the two men who had forced the skinny white man into the building’s service elevator. She would not be revealing the color of the pickup truck they drove, nor the origin of the out-of-state license plate on the front of the vehicle. She would not be risking the assailants’ retributions. She would not be leaving her son to grow up without a mother.

She leaned down and brushed her lips across the forehead of her beautiful child, snuggling her nose into the dark curls at the top of his head.

In Tenisha’s mind, Fobe had begun life with two strikes against him. He was Black, and he was being raised by a single mother. She knew the assumptions that would be made about him and the challenges he would face because of these two basic circumstances over which he had no control.

To compensate, she had made many sacrifices, some of them much bigger than simply hiding a few facts from the police.

Upon returning from maternity leave, she had given up the adrenaline rush and professional satisfaction of the Emergency Department at Northwestern Memorial and had taken a new job working days in the hospital’s endoscopy unit so she could be home with her baby at night. She had stretched her budget to the limit and had moved from her studio apartment to this high-rise building located closer to work and featuring an outdoor playground with protective fencing. Equally important, the rental agent had assured her the owners soon would install a much-needed high-tech security system.

She looked around Fobe’s room—my son has his own room— and smiled. He had furniture that matched, a thermostat on the wall, toys on top of the dresser and stacked in the closet, and a large bookcase filled with books, or more to the point, filled with dreams. A real home enhanced by the things so many people took for granted— things that had eluded Tenisha for the first three-quarters of her life.

She was proud of what she had accomplished on her own, and she was determined her son would have the opportunity to grow up in a safe and loving home. More importantly, she would make sure he had the opportunity to share that magnificent smile with a family of his own someday.

So, no, she would not be telling the police what she knew. And whether or not the authorities interpreted the man’s death as a murder, she would not be sharing her knowledge that it almost certainly was.

About the Author

Joseph “Joe” LeValley was fortunate to find success in three careers prior to becoming an author: journalism, health care, and music. He was a reporter-photographer for Iowa newspapers for seven years. During that time, Joe wrote articles ranging from breaking news to feature stories to personal columns. Subsequently, he served for more than 30 years as an executive in Iowa hospitals and its largest statewide health care network. During that time, he and his team won four national awards for communications excellence.

As a musician, Joe plays drums and guitar. He has performed with a number of groups and has written more than 40 songs. In 2016, he was inducted with the Mourning Glory Rock Band into the Iowa Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame.

A lifelong Iowan, Joe has a degree in journalism from Drake University in Des Moines and a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Iowa. He and his wife Jane have six children and live in Dallas County, Iowa.

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