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     Dr. Opie is a board-certified, retired heart surgeon; he and his family live in Scottsdale, Arizona.

     He began writing after three somewhat close personal encounters with terrorism. The first was in the middle 70s in the Tower of London. The IRA detonated a clock-timed bomb killing one and severely injuring 42. We had visited one week before this bombing and stood in the same queue. Our timing was definitely lucky. 

     Bombings and many additional terror attacks have continued in London, other parts of the UK and Europe, and all around the world in general - 9/11 was no exception. In those days, England and its large cities were somewhat dangerous. Customers who went shopping were wanded with metal detectors just to enter large department stores. The IRA has since made peace, but radical Islam has not. These days, it appears truck attacks have taken over, however, bombings still occur.

     After completing his cardiovascular and thoracic surgery residency training at the National Heart Hospital in London, Dr. Opie and his family went on a road trip around Europe in 1978. Driving between Pisa and Rome we ran into a very aggressive police roadblock. Within seconds, we had machine guns pointed into the car. The children were screaming. What had happened was the elder statesman and former Prime Minister of Italy, Aldo Moro, had been kidnapped by the Red Brigade terrorist group. Moro was kept hostage for 55 days and then murdered by ten shots into his chest. His body was found in the trunk of a red Renault 4 car on Via Michelangelo Caetani close to the Tiber River near the Roman ghetto, and not in our vehicle! We survived the police roadblock, but these two terrorism-related events left a profound impression on the author.

     In 1984, we returned to England, visited Brighton Beach, and toured the Grand Brighton Hotel. The English love the beach, but it is not very picturesque - lots of stones & minimal sand. A week later the IRA detonated a bomb in the Grand Brighton Hotel where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Party were meeting. The bomb was placed by IRA bomb-maker Patrick Magee using the pseudonym Roy Walsh. He had stayed at the hotel about 4 weeks before the detonation. He planted the bomb under the bath in his room which was directly below Thatcher's impending suite and wrapped the Frangex (gelignite) in cling film to avoid detection by bomb sniffer dogs. The timer was constructed from parts of a video recorder and a Memo Park Timer safety device. The bomb detonated at 2:54 am, on October 12, 1984. The bomb collapsed a large hole in the hotel and destroyed Thatcher's bedroom, but she was luckily up in her sitting room suite preparing her next day's speech. She changed her clothes from all the bomb debris and spent several hours in Police HQ in Brighton giving her account of what happened. She and her husband Dennis were not hurt, but they were clearly extremely lucky. Five died and 31 were seriously injured. Again, our timing visiting the hotel was extremely lucky. The construction of the hotel was strong enough to prevent the entire building from coming down. Clearly, the bomb was already planted and was waiting to detonate during our visit. Fortunately, the timer saved us. 

     Two years later in 1986, an article about a terrorist bombing outside the Tati Department Store on the Rue de Rennes in Paris lit the fuse - the article, in Time Magazine, complete with gory pictures, suggested it might be the work of either Actione Directe (an internal French urban terrorist group or possibly the International Faction of Revolutionary Command - IFRC). To Dr. Opie that second terrorist group - IFRC sounded like Carlos, the Jackal had gone back to terrorism after a prolonged layoff in Libya. He had been furloughed by the KGB following the very successful Vienna OPEC Headquarters attack, which netted the Jackal about $50M. That assumption turned out to be correct, and this bombing was preceded by five other city bombings with hundreds dead and more seriously injured. This bombing was the kernel for Dr. Opie's first novel the Medusa Papers published by Certes Press in 1998. Its second edition is available in PDF form in 2021. It is available as an e-novel presently, by contacting the author  Combining history with fiction ensures the books do not date and history's truth often impacts today's events.

     In commencing any novel, Dr. Opie completes an extensive review of the facts and relevant history and then creates a realistic somewhat fictionalized story based on the truth.

     Medusa Papers concerns the second terrorism career of Carlos, the Jackal - in this instance, he was financed by Iraq's Saddam Hussein. The reason for that is discussed in the updated novel and is directly related to the very effective 1981 Israeli Operation Opera. Dr. Opie is completing his 11th novel provisionally called Above Top Secret, which will be published when finished. It concerns the FRA. It's Murphy's Law in action.