Welcome to my newly improved website! I’m thrilled to report that I recently changed publishers. Blackstone Publishing is now the official home of flight instructor, former special operator, and certified troublemaker Cordell Logan.
The big news is that Blackstone has announced the re-release schedule for all of my previously published Logan novels, including the original audio version of each title featuring Ray Porter. The first book in the series, FLAT SPIN, will land Sept. 17, followed by FANGS OUT on Oct. 10, then VOODOO RIDGE (Oct. 15), THE THREE-NINE LINE (Nov. 5), HOT START (Nov. 19.), and THE KILL CIRCLE (Dec. 3). On Dec. 17, a brand new Logan mystery, DEEP FURY, will debut.
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My gratitude for your interest.
Blue skies,
David
Coming in December 2024
A naked man falls like a bomb from the night sky and crashes through the roof of a mobile home in Central California, nearly killing the elderly couple who live there. Officials later identify the man as Peter Hostetler, a well-respected executive of a California-based toy manufacturing company. Detectives are baffled. Who would murder a businessman who works for a toymaker in such bizarre fashion, and why?
For flight instructor and former government assassin Cordell Logan, Hostetler’s death is personal. Hostetler was Logan’s wingman when the two served as Air Force fighter pilots flying combat missions during Operation Desert Storm. Indeed, it was Hostetler who saved Logan’s wife during one particularly perilous mission over Iraq.
Determined to bring to justice whoever killed his battle buddy, Logan takes off in the Ruptured Duck, his aging Cessna 172. He soon discovers that the company where Hostetler worked is a front: the company manufactures highly classified radar components. But that’s not the half of it. Someone is covertly selling those components to a hostile foreign government, threatening to upset the global balance of power.
As Logan and his brilliant girlfriend, former CIA case officer Layne Sterling, struggle with relationship issues, a tangled trail of clues will lead him across California, deep into Mexico, and dangerously into harm’s way.
The seventh installment in the Amazon- and Audible-bestselling Cordell Logan mysteries, DEEP FURY continues the high-flying, page-turning tradition that has won the series rave critical reviews and a legion of loyal fans.
This one may be the best yet.
A father and son hunting deer in the mountains of Colorado happen upon a stunning sight: a vintage sports car…
More than forty years after being freed from the infamous “Hanoi Hilton,” three aging former American prisoners of war return…
At the height of the Cold War, a twin-engine Beechcraft bearing top-secret cargo departs from the Santa Paula Airport near…
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It’s called DEEP FURY and it’ll be released sometime in early 2024.
The Duck is modeled after an aging Cessna 172 my father-in-law once owned and let me fly so long as I paid for gas and its upkeep. A fine airplane with the worst paint job you ever saw. I logged several hundred hours on that plane before acquiring a Piper Cherokee 180 that I flew for more than ten years. I now own and fly a Cirrus SR20.
If only I knew! I’ll be sleeping or hiking or eating a burrito or taking a shower or watching TV, with my brain essentially on autopilot, and then—shazam!—an idea for a plot will come to me, seemingly out of the ether. One place I can tell you where plot ideas never hit me is when I’m behind the controls of an airplane. That’s one activity that requires full focus.
Each has its challenges and rewards, and each benefits the other. Writing fiction can help teach a journalist how to tell a fact-based story more engagingly. Practicing journalism, meanwhile, teaches the writer of fiction the values of veracity, technical accuracy, and detail in prose.
When a talented student is motivated to improve their craft and receptive to coaching, nothing is better than teaching! Conversely, little is more frustrating to me than when a student repeats the same mistakes over and over. You start to feel after awhile like you’re wasting their time and visa versa.
Mostly I helped intelligence collectors and analysts learn to do their jobs more effectively.
I fantasize about doing the Indiana Jones thing—only my version would involve tromping through the jungles of New Guinea, finding the wrecks of World War II aircraft, and restoring them to airworthiness. In reality, there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing than my current day job, which is making up and telling stories. It definitely beats working for a living!
On that day in June 1994, when Los Angeles police officers brought in O.J. Simpson for questioning in the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ron Goldman, I was 800 miles in Durango, Colorado, working on a cheeseburger, nursing a cold beer, and watching the media frenzy play out on a wall-mounted TV in the bar where I was having lunch. The sky over downtown LA…
If you’ve read any of my Cordell Logan mystery novels, you’ll know that Logan flies an old, cantankerous, four-seat Cessna 172 Skyhawk. Ditto in Logan’s latest adventure, Deep Fury, set for release Dec. 17. The plane, nicknamed the Ruptured Duck, has unreliable radios, hail-dimpled wings, and a faded orange, yellow and white color scheme that practically screams 1970’s, which makes sense, considering that’s when the Duck first took wing from Cessna’s…
Writing a mystery novel is not unlike piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. Each element must fit seamlessly to reveal the big picture. Introducing humor to this process while navigating tone and plot can be difficult, to say the least. Indeed, I’m often reminded of what actor Edmund Gwenn is purported to have remarked on his deathbed: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Drop the mic, Mr. Gwenn. It’s…
I don’t remember the moment I learned to float in a swimming pool, or to ride a bike without training wheels. The first time I tasted a fresh strawberry has been lost to antiquity. I do, however, remember like it was yesterday the first time I flew as pilot in command of an airplane. We’d practiced landings that clear August morning, my flight instructor, Bert J. Colter, and…
Flight (2012) With a thunderstorm directly along his route of fight, alcoholic, coke-snorting airline Capt. William “Whip” Whitaker (Denzel Washington), doesn’t ask ATC for a different heading or new altitude, like any actual commercial pilot would. Instead, he accelerates straight into the storm “to get through it faster”. The jet subsequently suffers a major mechanical malfunction requiring Whitaker to fly upside down before making a crash landing and…
