Ron Argo

SELECTED WORKS

Thriller
GONE MISSING
The deaths of six campesinos in the California desert was tragic enough before reporter Ray Myers discovered babies had crossed the border with them, babies now missing. The trail to find them hurls the reporter into the dangerous world of international human trafficking. The smuggling gang becomes crippled in chaos as mastermind Ricky Mendez devises a plan to get rid himself of everything related to the smuggling operation, including now a pesky reporter who keeps sniffing around in the wrong places. Myers, along with softhearted smuggler Maggie Frazier, find themselves on the run from Mendez’ henchmen while trying to rescue the babies from the ruthless Mexican trafficker who's the latest to hijack the children. It’s a race against time that drives them deep into Baja’s Indian country and through the seamy back streets of Ensenada.
War Drama
YEAR OF THE MONKEY
A wartime drama of friendship and betrayal. Set in Vietnam during the decisive Tet offensive, the story takes us on a perilous Heart of Darkness journey through a war we only thought we knew. The CIA has ordered Specialist Russell Payne to befriend and rat on Corporal Daryll Willingham as part of a secret operation that, no matter how sinister, cannot boost or sustain an unpopular war. The two troops are forced into an unwitting odyssey through hell -- and into a court-martial for murder. Originally published by Simon and Schuster, 382 pp
Southern gothic
THE SUM OF HIS WORTH
Set at the dawn of the bloody civil rights movement in 1959 Alabama, THE SUM OF HIS WORTH tells of the daring friendship of highschooler Sonny Poe and dentist Joe Peach who for different reasons in different ways together challenge an age-old culture of hypocracy and prejudice. With tensions mounting among Woodstock's teenage gangs and outside organizers set to burn a path for racial equality through the state, Sonny has more to fret over than girlfriends, grades and collecting money from his paper route customers. Sonny meets Doc Joe, an athletic doctor who should be more concerned with socializing and stock market gains than the gathering storm of the civil rights movement. Yet the maverick dentist seems compelled to throw away his practice and civic ranking for that very cause. Sonny admires everything Doc Joe stands for despite the mysteries that shroud his life. Sonny sees only a man dead set on "cleaning a dirty house" when he signs on for the upstart federal civil service job that he knows will open the floodgates on a corrupt town. Sonny's with Doc Joe a hundred percent--even when it comes to the deaths of people close by, and maybe his own, Doc Joe's or both.
Thriller
FROM THE SHADOWS
Now comes vengeance for a childhood of unspeakable evil. At age 26, Janice Parrish cannot keep friends, she's frigid, she's rebellious, she drinks too much. An up-and-coming real estate agent, she's losing clients. She committes a crime and can either go to jail or to counseling. It's with the counselor that her nightmare begins. With all the "signs" of having been sexually abused so long ago, why couldn't Janice remember? San Diego crime reporter Ray Myers has more than a gut feeling that this story is a trap for danger, but it will be him alone who must find the truth--before more murders take place.

  My Novels:
    GONE MISSING,
 
FROM THE SHADOWS,
  YEAR OF THE MONKEY

    In the Works:
  THE SUM OF HIS WORTH

        Read chapters by clicking title under Selected Works


"SUPERB...."--ALA Booklist "Highly recommended"--Library Journal, Kirkus Review, Booklist (Cover design by Simon and Schuster)

Acclaimed as one of the most important novels of Vietnam, Year of the Monkey is the gripping story of two American soldiers trapped in a mysterious web of corruption and death during the shattering Tet Offensive of 1968. Journalist Russell Payne's cushy assignment abruptly ends when a wild, tormented grunt named Willingham is inexplicably reassigned to the rear after an ambush that left everyone else in his unit dead. Ordered to befriend Willingham as part of a secret CIA investigation, Payne begins an unwitting odyssey into the heart of a war-torn jungle where he helplessly watches a childhood friend die, comes to love a woman who might be the enemy and winds up being court-martialed for murder. In stunning scenes of combat and intrigue, we glean as in no other novel or movie the patch-quilt nature of the Vietnamese people and the murderous deceit of body count politics from the grunt's eye--on both sides.


REVIEWS and PRAISE:
"If you tossed Ron Argo's novel onto the accumulated pile of books about the Vietnam war, it would land among those on top...and remain there. Fifty years from now this book could well serve as one of the more comprehensive testaments in American history." -- The San Diego Union

"No other Vietnam novel this reviewer has read conveys so achingly the subterfuge, duplicity, frustration and cover-ups of that war. Highly recommended." -- Library Journal

"Argo's extraordinary first novel of the brutalizing Vietnam conflict elevates him instantly to the front ranks of American war novelists--Crane, Dos Passos, Mailer, and James Jones...a compassionate novel by a fine storyteller--an artist." -- Harry Lawton, author of TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE

"...the FROM HERE TO ETERNITY of the Vietnam generation, a moving, human novel about Vietnamese and Americans alike whose lives were forever changed." -- Robert Houston

"A welcome departure from the norm in Vietnam war fiction... Payne gradually uncovers a trail of murder and betrayal that forces him to confront the terrible ambiguities underlying America's involvement in Vietnam. A superb novel, highly recommended." -- Steve Weingartner, Booklist

"Compelling reading that delivers an important piece of the Vietnam puzzle." -- Kirkus Review

"Argo's hook and the climactic twist delivered are both surprising and credible. Argo's Vietnam is very much the one readers and film-goers have come to know--a pestilent netherworld of inhuman living conditions and impossibly murky moral choices. This unsparing story is an effective confirmation of those portrayals." -- Publishers Weekly

"Argo has an eye for details and a good ear for the rhythms of human speech. His supporting characters are drawn with as much attention and skill as his protagonist." -- West Coast Review of Books


FROM THE SHADOWS -- a psychological thriller as chilling and suspenseful as "SEVEN"


Pedophile priests, at last exposed, are paying for their secret sins. But what of those abuses long ago in the home? As Janice Parrish searches the vacuum of a lost childhood, she stands charged for murdering the father she loved. But did she shoot him?

   I hope my latest work-in-progress, THE SUM OF HIS WORTH, will be a novel worthy of Conroy, Eudora Welty and maybe even Twain--a Southern coming-of-age mystery/thriller set in the formative civil rights days of the 50s in a not-so fictional Alabama town. (See Selected Works)   A bit of bio: It would have been better had I lived some place other than San Diego the past 30 years, someplace I might be able to finish a novel on time--say the ice plains of Minnesota. But I'm planted here with my wife, a small business owner caught in the crunch, and my teenage daughter, a performing arts student who hopes to dance with the stars and be a forensics investigator in law enforcement. Our dog is not a chihuahua, though his name is Prince. (He's a cattle dog.) I wish I could boast of earning my keep over the years through royalties off all my bestsellers and blazing journalistic work as a former newspaperman. Instead I've gotten by renovating old houses--a nice change from writing, though discomforting on the body.

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