Drone Strike: An Anthony Provati Thriller by Joe Giordano (Book Spotlight, Author Guest Post and Giveaway!)

Today, I'm spotlighting Joe Giordano's latest release, the second book in the Anthony Provati Thriller series. My review will be posted later this month on Library of Clean Reads. I asked Giordano how he created realistic settings for his novels. Scroll down for his guest post on this topic and then enter to win a copy of the book!

Book Details:

Book Title: Drone Strike: An Anthony Provati Thriller by Joe Giordano
Category: Adult Fiction, 290 pages
Genre: Thriller
Publisher: Rogue Phoenix Press
Release date: April 15, 2019
Format available for review: ebook (mobi, ePub, PDF)
Tour dates: April 15 to 26, 2019
Content Rating: PG-13 + M (for graphic violent terrorist scenes, no sex, no f-words.)

Book Description:

Karim’s family is killed by a U.S. drone strike in Iraq, collateral damage. The Islamic State in the Levant exploits his rage, recruiting him for a terrorist attack on the U.S., and only Anthony Provati can stop him. Drone Strike takes you on a fast-paced adventure across the Mediterranean, into Mexico, finally arriving in the States. Drone Strike explores the psychological realities that seduce Karim to commit an act of terror, includes a love story between Moslem Karim and Miriam, a Christian woman he defends in Turkey and highlights the plight of Middle Eastern and Central American refugees.

To read reviews, please follow Joe Giordano's page on Italy Book Tours.

​

Buy the Book:

Amazon ~ Barnes & Noble ~ Kobo

Add to Goodreads

Guest Post:

How I Create Realistic Settings for My Novels

by Joe Giordano

Realistic settings spring from both personal experience and research.

As a retired International Executive Vice President of 3M, I lived in Greece, Brazil, Belgium, and the Netherlands and traveled extensively, experiencing the cultures and locations around the world that appear in my writing. For example, my first foreign assignment had been as Managing Director, running a business in Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa out of Athens. giving me first-hand experience with Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern people and most of the locations in Drone Strike.

With both Appointment with ISIL, An Anthony Provati Thriller, and Drone Strike, the just-published, second book in the series, a University of Texas class on Islamic history provided me with additional background.

Regarding Birds of Passage, An Italian Immigrant Coming of Age Story, my first novel, an historical fiction set around the turn of the twentieth-century, all my grandparents and my father were immigrants from Naples. They entered the United States during the Progressive Era. To learn about the environment they encountered, I took a graduate course on the period at the University of Texas and my research interest and term paper topic was Italian immigration. While Birds of Passage was not about my family, my experience growing up with immigrants allowed me to capture how they thought and acted.

Library research and the Internet are excellent sources for accurate details on settings without needing to visit or revisit a location. For example, I’ve toured both the San Gennaro Cathedral in Naples and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, two sites in Drone Strike, and through Internet images, I refreshed my memory on features inside both churches. Street level Internet map applications allowed me to virtually walk around Bodrum, a Turkish city I hadn’t visited in years, another locale featured in Drone Strike.

Meet the Author:

As a former International Executive Vice President of 3M, Joe Giordano’s experience included running a business in the Middle East out of Athens, Greece. Born in New York, he’s had first-hand experience with the cultures and most of the locations in Drone Strike.

Joe's stories have appeared in more than one hundred magazines including The Saturday Evening Post and Shenandoah. His novels, Birds of Passage: An Italian Immigrant Coming of Age Story (2015) and Appointment with ISIL: An Anthony Provati Thriller (2017) were published by Harvard Square Editions. Read the first chapters and sign up for his blog at http://joe-giordano.com/
​
Joe was among one hundred Italian-American authors honored by Barnes & Noble Chairman Len Riggio to march in the 2017 Manhattan, Columbus Day Parade.

Connect with the author: Website ~ Twitter ~ Facebook ~ Pinterest

Enter the Giveaway!

Ends May 3, 2019

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Appointment with ISIL: An Anthony Provati Thriller by Joe Giordano (Review & Giveaway)

Book Details:

Book Title: Appointment with ISIL: An Anthony Provati Thriller by Joe Giordano
Category: Adult Fiction, 299 pages
Genre: Literary Thriller
Publisher: Harvard Square Editions
Release date: June 2017
Content Rating: PG-13 (No f-words but there's mild profanity and religious expletives, some depictions of gory violence and brief sexual content.
​
Book Description:

This time, Anthony's libido threatens his life. He flirts with Russian mob boss, Gorgon Malakhov's mistress. The Russian deals in death. ISIL, the Islamic State in the Levant, wants the product. Russian Intelligence supplies the means, and an art theft funds the scheme. ISIL's targets are chilling. The chase across the Mediterranean is on. Can Anthony thwart ISIL? Will he survive?

Praise for Appointment with ISIL:

​"A roller-coaster ride to the finish, this book confirms Giordano as a writer to eagerly watch."
- Kirkus Reviews

​"A sexy, all-in-one-breath read, this is a story for those eager to strap on their boots and immerse themselves in a whirlwind adventure that will take them from espresso in New York with the Italian Mafia to walking the Old City of Jerusalem with the chief of Israel’s security service."
- The iRead Review

“If you like gritty intriguing thrillers involving the FBI, Russian/Italian mobs or Islamic Terrorists you will absolutely love this book…. The characters, the plot and prose come together for an outstanding work of contemporary Americana. PRIMO highly recommends Appointment with ISIL."
– Primo Magazine

My Review:

Reviewed by Laura Fabiani

After reading Joe Giordano's first book, Birds of Passage, I was eager to read his latest release Appointment with ISIL and I was not disappointed. Although different in genre, Joe Giordano's crisp writing, complex plot and storytelling skills stand out in this book too. His main character Anthony Provati, an American-Italian with family in the Mafia, is a wonderfully flawed character who propels the story forward.

Anthony made his first mistake when he flirted with Russian mobster Malakhov's girlfriend. This leads to a series of events that gets Anthony involved with the Italian mob and finally leads him to ISIL territory and indirectly stopping terrorists attacks. Like a train, the story slowly builds momentum until it picks up full speed and the reader can't turn the pages fast enough to get to the end.

Giordano skillfully builds his characters, so each one distinctly stands out. Even the secondary characters get background information. Although the plot is multi-layered, it's easy to follow and there are no plot holes. Once again, I was impressed with Giordano's intelligent writing, the witty and dangerous dialogue among the mobsters and his knowledge of organized crime behaviour in different cultures. There was nothing predictable about the story (except perhaps that a pretty face would stir Anthony's libido) and I loved not knowing what was going to happen next.

Of course, the whole Italian connection appealed to me since I'm Canadian-Italian. I was very familiar with the Italian expressions used throughout the novel. I live in Montreal where the Italian Mafia is very active and was a topic of conversation at the dinner table among my father and my uncles. There are some rough scenes in the book, religious profanity and violence in the form of brutal killings, but none of it is too excessive considering the setting and circumstances of the story.

Appointment with ISIL is an impressive debut in the thriller genre, and a fantastic start to the Anthony Provati series. Joe Giordano is a talented author to watch out for, and I eagerly await his next novel.

To read more reviews, please follow the tour on Joe Giordano's page on Italy Book Tours.

Disclosure : Thanks to the author for sending me this book. I was not told how to rate and review this novel.

Buy the Book: 

Amazon ~ Barnes & Noble

Add to Goodreads

Meet the Author:

Joe Giordano was born in Brooklyn. He and his wife, Jane, have lived in Greece, Brazil, Belgium and the Netherlands. They now live in Texas.

Joe's stories have appeared in more than ninety magazines including The Monarch Review, The Saturday Evening Post, decomP, The Summerset Review, and Shenandoah. His novel, Birds of Passage, An Italian Immigrant Coming of Age Story, was published by Harvard Square Editions October 2015. His second novel, Appointment with ISIL, an Anthony Provati Thriller will be published by HSE in June 2017.

Connect with the author: Website ~ Twitter ~ Facebook ~ Pinterest

Enter the Giveaway!

Ends July 8

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Birds of Passage: An Italian Immigrant Coming of Age Story by Joe Giordano (Review and Giveaway!)

Birds of Passage: an Italian Immigrant coming of Age Story by Joe Giordano
Harvard Square Editions
ISBN: 9781941861080
Published: October 8, 2015
Trade paperback, 274 pages

Book description:

What turns the gentle mean and the mean brutal? The thirst for wealth? The demand for respect? Vying for a woman? Birds of Passage recalls the Italian immigration experience at the turn of the twentieth-century when New York's streets were paved with violence and disappointment.

Leonardo Robustelli leaves Naples in 1905 to seek his fortune. Carlo Mazzi committed murder and escaped. Azzura Medina is an American of Italian parents. She's ambitious but strictly controlled by her mother. Leonardo and Carlo vie for her affection.

Azzura, Leonardo, and Carlo confront con men, Tammany Hall politicians, the longshoreman's union, Camorra clans, Black Hand extortion, and the Tombs prison.

My review:

Italian historical fiction is one of my favorite genres, so it's no wonder that I was immediately attracted to this book. And I was not disappointed. Joe Giordano's telling of two young men from Naples, Leonardo, the beloved son of a poor farmer's wife, and Carlo, the coddled son of their wealthy landlord who make their way to New York in 1905, is filled with drama, despair, longing and hard choices.

It's not a morose tale, but one that spells reality, a reality that many immigrants, and in this particular case, Italian immigrants lived through. Giordano's own relatives did so and so did mine. My great-grandfather immigrated to Boston, my grandfather to Montreal followed by my father years later after he married my mom in Rome. So like the author, I grew up hearing immigration stories with parents who made sure we had a good education and took advantage of everything our country could give us.

The story takes place both in Naples, Italy and in New York. I was transported to these locations easily with Giordano's descriptions. His crisp writing was perfect for this kind of story. The dialogue clipped and direct. I was totally immersed in the story, pulled into the stark reality of immigrants trying to make a life for themself, caught up in Leonardo's innocence and watching as it was slowly stripped away. The characters are well developed and even the secondary characters get background information. I could easily see this book being made into a move because the compelling story, the realistic characters and the setting were all superb.

There were several layers to this story as it explored the themes of family obligation, vendettas, deciding between right and wrong, familial love, and women's independence. Leonardo struggled with these choices (both his and others), while Carlo followed his gut instincts even when they led to terrible actions. Azzura, the young woman they both fell in love with, also struggled but she made the right choices for herself, even if they were hard and initially caused her heartache. I admired her.

This was a story that made me think. It made me realize how difficult immigration must have been for my relatives, how heartbreaking some choices must have been. Of course, the ugly side of the mafia rears its head and although our parents shielded much of it from their children, they had to have lived in fear of its domination.

There are some rough scenes in the book, religious profanity and violence in the form of brutal killings, but none of it is too excessive considering the setting and circumstances of the story. Giordano is a gifted storyteller whose realistic stories pull you in and bring you back to the turn of the 20th century, where the back-breaking work and sweat of immigrants paved the way for a better future for all generations. 

To read more reviews, please visit Joe Giordano's page on Italy Book Tours.

Buy the book:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

eBook Promotion: 

The Kindle copy of Birds of Passage will be free to download for five days starting the day after the end of this virtual tour (Saturday, November 7th through Wednesday, November 11th)

About the Author:

Joe Giordano was born in Brooklyn. His father and grandparents immigrated to New York from Naples. Joe and his wife, Jane have lived in Greece, Brazil, Belgium and the Netherlands. They now live in Texas with their shih tzu Sophia. Joe's stories have appeared in more than sixty magazines including Bartleby Snopes, The Newfound Journal, and The Summerset Review.

Connect with the author: Website ~ Twitter ~ Facebook

And now for the Giveaway!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclosure : Thanks to the author for sending me this book in exchange for an honest review.