Clea’s Moon, first in the John Ray Horn series, is now an ebook. The novel, winner of the Debut Dagger Award, is available in several formats for reading on personal computers or portable readers such as the Kindle. Look for the other John Ray Horn mysteries to emerge in ebook format in the coming months. To order the electronic version of Clea’s Moon or to sample the first chapter, click here.

Ed’s latest novel, “From Blood,” is due in 2010. Shannon Fairchild, a brilliant but alienated young woman, loses her parents in a horrific double murder – then discovers that they were not her parents. She is the child, she learns, of two of America’s most wanted fugitives, anti-war militants who went underground after a fatal bombing in 1968 and never resurfaced. Propelled by the dying words of the woman who reared her, Shannon sets out on a mission to find her birth parents and warn them that someone is after them – someone much more dangerous than the FBI. Her search begins in California and ranges through much of America, from San Francisco to Chicago and from Montana to Seattle. As she unearths long-buried secrets while trying to stay one step ahead of a shadowy killer, she feels the passions of the tumultuous Sixties being reborn, and she now knows that nothing is more dangerous than someone willing to die for a cause.

PROLOGUE – 1968

In the darkest part of the night, there is a special quiet to the grassy and tree-shrouded areas of a large university campus.

With no sign at its entrance, the building stands half-obscured by greenery on the edge of the sprawling grounds. Three stories tall, it has an anonymous institutional red-brick look, and those who ask its function are sometimes told that it houses administrative offices of the university, which it once did. That well-rehearsed fiction has kept its actual role hidden for two years.

Tonight the building’s rooms and hallways are silent, emptied of their usual complement of analysts, linguists, and retired military officers. The only lighted room is the reception area on the first floor, where Danny Kerner, the night watchman and a graduate student in philosophy, is on duty. Danny sits, feet up on his desk, paging through an essay by Nietzsche.

He has long hair, like most of the male students at LaValle, but he prides himself on not fitting others’ preconceptions. As an undergraduate, while his friends were partying or demonstrating for the liberal cause du jour, he was working nights to pay his tuition. Now, at twenty-three and just starting a family, he relies on the extra income from this job to get him through graduate school while avoiding more handouts from his wife’s parents. He tries not to show too much curiosity about what goes on during the daytime in this somewhat mysterious location. Still, the secrecy of the building’s staff – extending even to requiring him to sign a pledge not to disclose anything he sees there – has intrigued him.

He turns the page and reads the next passage: At bottom, every human being knows that he is in this world just once. Many die too late, and a few die too early. . . . Die at the right time – thus teaches Zarathustra.

Somber material, but Danny reads it with equanimity. He’s feeling almost serene, the result of a decision he reached only hours ago, before he left the apartment to begin his night shift. In the coming days he will apply to divinity school, the first step in training for the ministry. For weeks he has wrestled with the question, and Peggy has wrestled with it too.

I know I can teach philosophy, he told her in one moment of doubt. I don’t know that I’ve got it in me to –

Stop right there, she interrupted, her voice intense. You don’t know yourself as well as I do. You’re a good person, a brilliant student, and you’d make a wonderful minister. She held up the baby and jiggled her gently in front of him. Tell Daddy he’ll look very sexy in a clerical collar.

Refilling his cup with barely warm coffee from a flask, he pauses in his reading and recalls one night when his curiosity about the building was boosted an extra notch. On his rounds, he found an unlocked door – a rarity in a place where all the doors throughout the building are normally double-locked. He entered to make sure there were no intruders and saw a medium-size room with locked filing cabinets ranging alongside all the walls, a large table in the center, and detailed topographic maps pinned up on cork boards. One map, he noted, bore the title Dien Bien Province. Another, showing what looked like a city and the surrounding countryside, was labeled Ha Noi.

He backed out of the room quickly, double-locking the door with his set of keys.

Ha Noi, he thought. Hanoi. Vietnam.

I don’t know what they do here, but it sounds closer to the military than the university. Some kind of research place, maybe, squirreled away here in a quiet corner of LaValle. Some of the campus firebrands, he knew, would love to know about this place. They’d probably burn it to the ground.

Danny had strong feelings about his government’s involvement in that small Southeast Asian country, where 30,000 Americans and untold numbers of Vietnamese had died, with no sign of a letup. Students had heard rumors of undercover connections between the Pentagon and certain universities – Michigan State was one of those mentioned – but LaValle’s name had never cropped up. If the Pentagon was running or funding a secret Vietnam War think tank on this university’s campus, he thought, someone should know about it.

He told Peggy about his discovery. Her response was immediate. Holding the baby in her arms, she cried out, Don’t, Danny. Please don’t. You’ll get fired, and maybe worse. You need this job. We need the money.

Feeling torn between family and conscience, he kept quiet.

Having made his hourly rounds tonight, Danny returns to his station and leans down to inspect the small, carefully wrapped bundle he has placed under the desk to shade it from his reading light. All quiet, he mutters. He sips at his coffee; it’s now cold. The clock on the wall reads a quarter past two, which means another forty-five minutes until his next inspection trip. He retrieves his book but is distracted by thoughts of Peggy. Two days ago, a full-blown case of the flu put her into the campus infirmary. She resisted going because of the baby, but Danny assured her that Tina would be fine.

A muffled, ambiguous noise from somewhere makes him look up. What was that? In the blackness outside the window, a late November wind has kicked up, and tree branches are scraping against the bricks of the outer wall. He settles back down.

Were he not so drowsy, he would know that the sound came from elsewhere – the rear of the building, where three black-clad figures wearing ski masks have worked their way up an old and rusted fire escape to the second floor and forced open a window. Now, carrying flashlights, burglar tools, and a heavy canvas bag, they prowl the corridor until they come to a large office in the heart of the building. Jimmying the lock with minimal noise, they open the door. While two of the figures peel off as sentinels, the third enters the office and begins to work.

Twenty minutes pass.

At his station, Danny drains the last of his cup and checks his watch. In a little over five hours, he’ll be able to visit Peggy. Can’t take Tina, though. Don’t want to expose her to Mommy’s flu. He wonders if Peggy’s fever allowed her any sleep tonight.

Picking up the Nietzsche, he looks for the quote from Zarathustra but is reluctant to resume reading. He’s simply too happy – with thoughts of Peggy and Tina, with his recent life-changing decision – to read about death, no matter how abstract the argument.

Tina-Marina, he says silently, using his favorite nickname for her, you may be the only one getting a good night’s sleep. You don’t know how lucky –

It is his last thought.

A deafening blast tears through the quiet night, audible at the farthest reaches of the campus and even in the town itself. As the building’s guts are torn apart, a white fireball blooms in its center, a thing of beauty, rendering the area around it as bright as day for a few seconds. Bricks and mortar fly like shrapnel, shredding the trees. The fireball fades to the color of molten lava, and the upper two floors, almost in slow motion, collapse onto the ground level. The night watchman’s station, like everything else on the first floor, is crushed beneath tons of weight.

The doomsday noise gradually dies away. Minutes pass, and flames begin to lick at the wreckage.

Police, firefighters, and campus security swarm over the site. One of the bombers, apparently injured in the explosion, is found nearby. Eventually the fire is put down, and the digging begins. At first light, Danny Kerner’s mangled body is removed from the rubble. At the same time, claims of responsibility are being telephoned to news organizations.

This is the Red Fist, the female caller declares. We strike at the heart of the war machine.

But the horror is not finished. A young woman appears at the disaster scene. She has just bolted from the campus infirmary and is still racked with fever. Her words are laced with hysteria, and it takes a while for rescue workers to understand.

I was sick, she sobs. I couldn’t take care of her. He didn’t want to bring her here with him, but. . . . Oh, God.

The police commander on the scene is summoned. He huddles with the young woman, then steps back, his face frozen by her words. He summons the senior firefighter, who listens intently, then begins bellowing orders to his men. They swarm over the still-smoldering site, hacking and digging at the charred remnants of what will soon become known to the world as the Crowe Institute.

An hour goes by. Finally one fireman, his voice cracked with strain, yells that he has found something. He lifts a tiny bundle, wrapped in a singed blanket, from the wreckage, his face twisted in grief.

Reporters and camera crews press in, but police hold them back. “No pictures of this!” the fire captain screams. “I’ll break the first camera. . . ”

Peggy Kerner sinks to her knees, wailing, and all the others stand silent as the soot-streaked fireman carries what remains of her baby to the ambulance.

* * *

In all the attacks, the riots, and the bombings that plagued America in the tumultuous 1960s and ’70s, the Crowe Institute bombing of 1968 had a special notoriety. It stirred up calls for vengeance, transformed the thinking of the radical left, and sent one militant to prison and others deeper underground. Over the years, most of them either were captured or resurfaced and surrendered.

All but two. . . .