Deathsman

John Hardin is the WITSEC identity of a pilot who runs a shoestring aerial photography business flying his Cessna out of Asheville, North Carolina.He's restoring a log home on Eaglenest Ridge overlooking the Great Smokies village of Maggie Valley, and does house repairs to augment his income. He shares his place with an octogenarian couple, Hank and Hattie Gaskill, escapees from a depressing rest home, and he has an independent Cherokee girlfriend, Kitty Birdsong, who rides her own lipstick-red motorcycle.A burly biker friend of theirs, Brandon Doyle, runs afoul of a drug lord who controls a large operation selling synthetic analogs of cocaine, heroin, and ecstasy. John and Kitty try to help Doyle, and all three suddenly find themselves in a mortal struggle against the drug kingpin and his legendary hit man named after those executioners of centuries past, the professional traveling beheaders and hangmen known as the deathsmen.

Phil is a lifelong freelance writer with 300 articles and short stories published in national magazines including Reader’s Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, Grit, Harpers, Troika, Yankee, Overdrive, Heartland USA, MAKE, and several boating and aviation publications. He writes the John Hardin suspense series, and has a collection of his short stories available that includes an award-winning tale begun by Stephen King. He was born and raised in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, and thus has an abiding love of the mountains, one reason his suspense novels are set largely in the Great Smokies, which he visits as often as possible. He has worked as a draftsman, a water quality field technician, an inventor, an aerial photographer, and a graphic artist and president and co-owner of a graphics company. Phil is an instrument-rated pilot, a Coast Guard-licensed master mariner, a motorcycle rider, an astronomy buff, and a fiddler. He’s a voracious reader of everything and likes to walk the ocean beaches to exercise his body and his imagination. He lives in eastern North Carolina on a shore of the wide Neuse River, where he’s at work on several short stories and his next novel.