Money Troubled

Colonel Jack Faulkner, a retired Military Intelligence Cold Warrior, doesn't have any money troubles, but it seems that many of those around him do, including his soon-to-be ex-wife, her lover, and an old high school and college chum turned famous financial genius. As investment bubbles threaten to burst Col. Jack begins to take an interest in high finance. It is merely out of curiosity at first, the knee-jerk reaction of an old spy who spent 30 years digging out closely held secrets as a profession, but when he starts hitting big time paydirt it becomes an obsession, and that obsession leads to a round-the-world paper chase as he dusts off his old investigative chops and applies them to closely held civilian secrets. It's a wild, wacky, and sometimes merry chase that meanders through Mexico, Ecuador, Argentina, China, Macao, Singapore, Thailand, and then back to Washington DC. Col. Jack is after the truth, and the truth is the last thing that the people he runs into want him to find, but find it he does. That leaves one outstanding problem....what to do with the truth?

M H Burton was born in 1945 the son of a cheese maker with a 5th grade education, grandson of a barely literate blacksmith-failed farmer-fiddler-singer-story teller, and great grandson of an illiterate lead miner who fled Ireland in 1851 to escape the Potato Famine. With such a distinguished background how could he be anything but a great writer? That’s what I thought when I was 18, but like most things people think when they are 18, it was dead wrong. I did manage to excel to the extent that I was the first of my kin to graduate from college, though that only got me an invite from my draft board to the Vietnam War. Fearing that I would be too large a target as an infantryman I opted for a ’voluntary’ enlistment and ended up a translator/interpreter in Thailand. Then it was back to the States and a year of unemployment before I stumbed into Computer Software Development and Systems Analysis, which kept me busy for 30 years. Finally at age 60 to writing. Since I no longer wanted to be famous I could start small with some short stories. Then a collection of stories from my military days became ＂Tales of Ramasun＂ in honor of the signal intelligence gathering base in (then) remote NE Thailand where I spent most of my soldiering time. Having shucked the burden of fame, writing has become fun, and relatively easy. I spend my winters at my Thai wife’s place in Thailand and summers at our small, Spartan Minnesota lake cabin. A cabin no unlike Col. Jack’s place in ＂Money Troubled＂.