The Third Book by James W. Faris

About the book

Carrie Thompson's fiancee, Gary Temor, disappears in the middle of the night without a trace. When Gary's house is found burned with a body inside, Carrie is accused of murder. A mysterious file named The Third Book is her only hope of learning what happened. It's in an unbreakable computer code.

She locates a person who says he wrote the code. He reveals himself as Paul Diamond, co-founder of Netsafe, a computer security and encryption company.

The files reveals an anti-terrorism task force led by Raymond Lang recruited Gary. He interviews terrorist leaders and makes them feel he is sympathetic to their cause. He learns of a person who provides money and intelligence to the networks, referred to as the "glue."

Carrie is taken by the terrorists and sealed in a cave. She finds a narrow seam in the rock and gets out. The cave is in the mountain where Diamond's hideaway is located. She tells FBI agent, Sam Wilkins, her story. He sends a team to the mountain.

They decode the rest of the disk. Gary wouldn't reveal to Lang who the mysterious glue is until he got him safely out of the undercover situation. Lang is now holding Gary in North Carolina.

Wilkins leads an operation to ambush the terrorists coming to take Gary. Carrie slips away from the perimeter and infiltrates the farmhouse. She frees Gary but they are captured by the terrorists.

Paul Diamond is the glue. He takes Carrie and Gary to an island. They discover nuclear missiles. They find a way to contact Wilkins.

Wilkins brings an FBI team. It's a trap and they are captured. The real Paul Diamond is captive on the island. The person masquerading as Diamond is Larry Cross, Diamond's former partner at Netsafe.

Carrie uses a ruse with the guards and escapes with Diamond and Gary. Electronic pulse bomb missiles lead the attack to cripple defenses. They fly the pulse missiles back after launch and detonate them close to the nuclear missiles, destroying the triggering devices.

Carrie and Gary go into FBI protection at Diamond's mountain retreat. Diamond's security chief, known as Weber, arrives. Gary recognizes him as a terrorist leader. The terrorists never left the mountain. They knew parts of the cave system the FBI didn't find.

Cross hinds by resuming his masquerade as Diamond. Carrie uses a gun hidden in her clothes and kills Cross. The real power is the database Cross accumulated. It's on a set of compute disks Weber carries.

They escape by posing as Weber taking the disks to safety. The information on the disks leads them to the hidden assets of Cross and provides proof where the terrorists obtained material for the nuclear missiles.

About the author

The author was born in Fort Riley Kansas in 1943. His father was a major in the Army. His grandfather, Charles Faris, was a federal judge at the court of appeals in St. Louis. His maternal grandfather was a retired executive in Hoberg, Missouri, a very small town near Mount Vernon in Southwest Missouri. The two grandfathers would be the inspiration for the judge in the novel 1953.

After the war his father moved the family back to St. Louis and resumed his law practice.

In 1950 the author's father took a job as an assistant attorney general and they moved to Jefferson City, Missouri. He was a liberal Democrat and became involved in the politics managing the failed senatorial campaign of the attorney general. The author was exposed at an early age to the inner workings of the political machine.

His father died in 1958. They moved to Mount Vernon, Missouri, to be close to his family. They moved back to Jefferson City during the author's senior year in high school.

He graduated from the University of Missouri in 1965. His major area was history and political science. The author's uncle, William Faris, sparked a lifelong interest in reading, history, and political intrigue.

After college, he served in the Army as an officer. During that time he was able to spend time with intelligence officers and listened to many tales of their exploits. At least some of them were possibly true.

After military service he began a career in industry as a manufacturing supervisor in a small town in West Virginia. During the next few years the author progressed through increasing levels of responsibility. His thirty three years have been principally spent in the aerospace industry. He turned around several divisions, once being called the company doctor. That was part of the inspiration for the novel of the same name.

The author grew one company from eight million annual sales to fifty million. He rose to the position of group vice president in charge of an aerospace group with six hundred million in annual sales. He traveled all over the world as part of his job.

He is past president of the board of the Indiana State University Department of Aerospace technology. He is the author and teacher of a course on career planning and goal setting.

The author and his wife Janet live in Tallahassee, Florida. She is a schoolteacher and a potter and in many ways the inspiration for Carrie in The Third Book.

BOOKS
(Completed & Unpublished)
The Puppetmaster's Tale
The Company Doctor
The Third Book
1953