Secret Agenda

March 30, 2009. Terrorists attack a police academy in Lahor, Pakistan. In the ensuing gun battle 12 are killed.
Nearly 80 years earlier Omar Ahmad, the son of a Sunni cleric was born in Lahor, India. He was educated in England, Cambridge, and returned to Lahore, by then a border city in Pakistan. He traveled with several mystics friends to the ancient Himalayan country of Bhutan to study its Tantric form of Buddhism, introduced years before by a Tibetan lama. After arriving back in Pakistan, he had dreams of goods telling him to form a community to carry forth a new way of life, solemn and mystic, with the cultures he found in Bhutan. He and his friends chose Germany as the place to begin this new life, they settled on land outside of Frankfurt, and they began recruiting more followers. Ahmad changed his name to Shabdrung and named the community Ngawang, both after the Tibetan lama. Among the new recruits were Stephen Boras, a young lawyer from California, and Jackie Green, a black engineer from New York. Boras changed his name to Nahir and Green to Jamaar. The followers became known as the Ngawangeesh.
The proximity of Ngawang to urban population soon became a major problem. The mystical and unusual customs of the Ngawangeesh created suspicion, particularly by government officials who refused to remove regulatory road blocks to Shabdrung's plans. Shabdrung finally moved his community to eastern Pennsylvania. But here again they were too close to urban areas, where their customs bread suspicion and negative reaction. Shabdrung realized that he needed a remote location to develop his plan. A former partner of Nahir found an abandoned ranch in the rural desert of southeastern Sherman County in Oregon, which Shabdrung bought in the late '70s, settled his flock there, and began development of a permanent Ngawang.
This is the beginning of the story in Secret Agenda. From there a fascinating tale follows of the shady acquisitions, private and public, that resulted in the expansion of Ngawang, and of numerous court battles that developed, bring the principal character, lawyer Barry O'Shea, and his legal team into the saga to repel Shabdrung's agenda.

The Secret Agenda

Secret Agent is the title of a book that will be released by SterlingHouse on July 30, 2009. It is the first in a series of stories about a Portland, Oregon civil trial lawyer Barry O'Shea. Each book in the series is a story about interesting and moving situations that give rise to a civil trial, a challenge that is almost unheard of in the genre of legal mysteries. The background of this book is a mysterious middle-eastern mystic and the cult of his followers who located on an abandoned ranch in the barren deserts of north, central Oregon in the late 1970s. The story develops with the events that occur through the antics of this strange cult as it progresses with it's secret agenda. Adding to the mystery is a revealing article written by the editor of a local newspaper that leads to startling and fascinating libel trial with an unusual ending. The reader will be riveted to the principal character, Barry O'Shea, as he weaves his way through the antics of the cult and its members into the defense of the editor and the newspaper in the libel trial.

I have written two sequels to the Secret Agent that have yet to be published. Vital to the Defense is the second and is scheduled to be released sometime in 2010. In it Barry O'Shea is faced with an entirely different factual situation, a huge fire in a south eastern Oregon plywood mill, and ruthless actions of the mill owner and his female CFO that predated the fire. Again all of this leads to a dramatic and revealing civil trial.

The third book is entitled The Second District and will probably not be published until 2011. This story is about a famous actor who becomes a cattle rancher in south eastern Oregon and decides to run for Congress from the second district in Oregon. He hires Barry O'Shea when he becomes embroiled in legal tangles with the sitting Congressman. Those tangles ultimately involved a recount of the election and the trial by a three judge panel on a contest of the recount. Again the trial ends in a surprising way.

I will report more about these three beginning books in the Barry O'Shea series as the dates of their release near.