by H. L. Wegley
I'll go with you, Drew. Let's get out of here.
Those words had been a one-time decision, a commitment of her life. It was much like Beth’s commitment to follow her Lord. That had been an act of her will to place her faith and trust in another, just as she had done by pledging her love to Drew.
Her pledge declared that Beth was all in, the kind of decision from which there’s no turning back.
But then … who would want to?
I'll go with you, Drew. Wherever He takes us.
The End
If you enjoyed No Turning Back, please consider leaving a rating and a brief review on Amazon. Reviews are difficult to get and greatly appreciated by authors and readers. You can find No Turning Back on H. L. Wegley’s Amazon Author Page.
Author’s Notes
In writing No Turning Back, the biggest challenge I faced was creating the character of my heroine, Beth Sanchez, such that she would be a high-priority target for the drug lord, Hector Suarez. My solution was to combine two real-world stories that I will share, briefly.
The first story is about the man who inspired the Mexican people to form militias to stand up to the oppression of the drug cartels.
A doctor in Mexico decided to take action to stop the bleeding of the local people caused by drug cartels’ demands for monthly protection money. When the monthly payments became more than the people could pay, the doctor rallied the men of the community to form a militia. He armed and trained them, and systematically drove the cartel from the area.
Mexican law enforcement feared the cartels and many government officials were corrupt, often cooperating with the drug lords. The people preferred to risk their lives by forming a militia rather than depend on the unreliable government for protection.
Each time the militia defeated a group of cartel thugs, the doctor would confiscate their weapons and use them to grow his militia. As word of his success spread throughout the country, he would travel to new areas and preach about freedom from the cartels. The people heard the doctor’s message, believed it, followed him, and drove the cartels from their areas.
After the doctor moved on, the militias he left behind continued to grow on their own, until their power became a concern to the Mexican government. By this time, the doctor had become a folk hero, a man who had killed a lot of drug cartel members. Consequently, he became the government’s focus for solving its perceived militia problem. The government’s plan was to stop the doctor and then hope the militias would die.
The government arrested the doctor on illegal weapons charges. This was almost too ironic to believe. The doctor had done the job that Mexican law enforcement was afraid to do, and they arrested the man who could have shown them how to defeat the cartels and restore law to Mexico. But the officials were too afraid and/or too corrupt.
Law enforcement imprisoned the doctor for three years, until his influence diminished, then freed him in 2018 without ever trying him on the weapons charges. He’s not as active as he once was, but still tries to inspire his countrymen to drive the cartels from their towns and villages.
The real-life doctor became Beth Sanchez’s father, Rafael Sanchez, in my story. To complete Beth as a character, I needed to give her strong feelings of guilt. I used another real-life story to accomplish that.
While researching drug cartels in Mexico, I ran across a terrible incident, the Allende Massacre of 2011. It seems that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) obtained some critical intelligence information about the leaders of Los Zetas, perhaps the most violent drug cartel in Mexico. Evidently, the DEA shared the intel with Mexican law enforcement, and a dirty cop, or other compromised official, told Los Zetas.
As a result, the cartel swept through Allende and the surrounding area, breaking into houses, looting, burning buildings, and killing people to ensure they found the Los Zetas traitors who leaked the information to the DEA. They killed hundreds of people in horrible ways.
No one was ever prosecuted, and the incident was hardly investigated due to fear of Los Zetas. To this day, the people of Allende suffer in silence.
I borrowed this incident and had my heroine lie to her mother to get permission to go with friends to a place her parents had forbidden her to go. When she returns, she finds her parents, and most of the people in the town, dead.
I laid a big guilt trip on Beth Sanchez. She lied and lived, when a good daughter would have stayed home and died. That provided the wound in her backstory, her character flaw, and it set up the black moment for her in my novel.
It was a nasty thing to do to a beautiful young woman like Beth, but authors have to make a living somehow, and pain in the backstory is one way we do it.
Another problem arose in the scenes that comprise the final conflict, that big battle where the hero and heroine save the day or save their lives.
I ended up with my hero, Drew, pitted against thirty cartel thugs who were armed with AK-47s. Drew needed some help to defeat the cartel members or the story would not have been credible. In short, I needed a skilled warfighter to help Drew. So I borrowed Steve Bancroft, Army Ranger and weapons specialist, from Voice of Freedom, which is set in the same area as No Turning Back. Steve lives only a few miles from Drew’s horse ranch.
A little about the setting for No Turning Back—the story starts in Big Bend National Park. While my wife and I lived in Texas, we intended to visit the park, but we never did. I’ve driven through West Texas, a little north of Big Bend, so I’m familiar with the area around Fort Stockton and Pecos, the location of the Federal District Court for West Texas. But, unfortunately, I had to visit the park virtually.
I know the Central Oregon setting well, because my wife and I spend a week there every summer. My photo collection contains over 13 GB of digital shots that I’ve taken from Sun River, Bend, Sisters, Crooked River Ranch, and northward to Lake Billy Chinook, and Madras.
I shot the desert scene used for the background of the cover. On the printed version, the scene wraps around to the back. I took this picture in the twilight following a sunset at Crooked River Ranch. Smoke from forest fires turned the sky an eerie mixture of reds, purples and shades of gray.
The setting for the horse ranch in No Turning Back is near the Deschutes River, a short distance from Steelhead Falls, and a little east of the town of Sisters—beautiful country. I mention the Three Sisters in the story. These three, adjacent volcanic peaks grace the western skyline from the ranch’s location.
Although there is no horse ranch at the exact location I chose, there are several ranches in the area that breed and sell thoroughbred quarter horses, equine dragsters, as Drew called them. They are the fastest horses in the world, for short distances. Quarter horses are featured in movies, rodeos, and they are the preferred horses for ranch work.
Several times in the story I mention Beth’s personality type, INTJ. I gave Beth that personality because it is surrounded by a lot of mystique. The Meyers-Briggs Type, INTJ, denotes introverts who use their intuition combined with rational thinking. They can often jump from a small amount of information to a conclusion that explains, with incredible accuracy, all the observations and how they relate to human origin, meaning, destiny—sorry. I got a bit carried away. However, INTJs are called the Research Scientist type and sometimes the Mastermind, for good reason.
The rarest personality on planet Earth is the female INTJ. Comprising 0.8% of the population, this type is queried on the Internet more than any other personality type. Why? Because of the mystique surrounding them and the difficulty in establishing a relationship with them. It’s a real challenge to win their trust, thus their love. But once a person does, they have a loyal friend or, if they’re lucky, a spouse for a lifetime.
Nearly all INTJs are highly intelligent. They don’t display a lot of emotion—unless you consider sarcasm an emotion—though they feel things deeply. For this reason, some people call them insensitive. To get an INTJ to say, “I love you,” is difficult. Drew experiences that with Beth. B
ut once an INTJ says it, they mean it and will stick with you when no one else will. That’s who I wanted Beth Sanchez to be, a heart worth winning. I hope you like her and her story.
If you enjoyed No Turning Back, please consider leaving a rating and a brief review on Amazon and possibly Goodreads. Reviews are hard to come by and greatly appreciated by authors.
My next release, Virtuality, is a stand-alone story—a high-stakes, techno-thriller with romance. It’s a clean, character-driven story featuring equal parts romance and suspense. Look for it in November 2018.
H. L. Wegley
Don’t miss H. L.Wegley’s award-winning, political-thriller series, with romance, Against All Enemies:
Book 1: Voice in the Wilderness
Book 2: Voice of Freedom
Book 3: Chasing Freedom (The Prequel)
Read all three books in the Witness Protection Series—action and romance with thriller-level stakes—clean reads that are never graphic, gratuitous, or gross.
Witness Protection Series
Book 1: No Safe Place
Book 2: No True Justice
Book 3: No Turning Back
Romantic suspense with thriller-level stakes
Vince van Gordon inherits control of break-through, virtual-reality technology that could make him one of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet. But, if commercialized, the technology would likely shred the fabric of American society beyond mending. Keeping it a secret only delays the inevitable. And, once the secret is leaked, there are people who will kill for the wealth and power. Stopping it may literally require an Act of Congress, and Vince will need the help of brilliant Jess Jamison, his childhood soulmate, the girl who shattered his heart seven years ago.
Releasing November 2018