Ron Argo

AUTHOR

SELECTED WORKS

Southern Gothic fiction

   In 1960 Alabama the Jim Crow laws were strong as ever in a town run by corrupt officials and a powerful Klan. In this incendiary climate a white doctor tries to save a community of blacks brutalized for decades and now facing a toxic holocaust from a caustic chemical plant.

   It’s a quixotic fantasy to believe he can do much to help, but the determined young doctor pushes bloodily through one physical or emotional encounter into others for a cause grown much bigger than itself and him until, in the end....

   Segregation, corruption and hate are the driving forces in The Sum of His Worth, a tragic tale in the voice of an adventurous, sympathetic youth. This is a heartwarming, stunning story running on almost pure adrenaline.

Thriller

  Now comes vengeance for a childhood of unspeakable evil.

  Janice Parrish, does not remember shooting her father at pointblank range.

  At age 26 Janice cannot keep friends. She's frigid, she's rebellious, she drinks too much. An up-and-coming real estate agent, she's losing clients.

  Finally Janice committes a crime for which she can either go to jail or in to counseling.

  Enter pop-psych analyst Patricia Zeck, and Janice's nightmare begins.

  Zech determines she has all the "signs" of having been sexually abused in early childhood. But why couldn't Janice remember?

  San Diego crime reporter Ray Myers has more than a gut feeling he should avoid this story, which of course no reporter worth his mettle could do. Finally, it will be Myers alone who must find the truth--before more murders take place.
War Drama

  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 & Schuster, 382 pp
Adventure/thriller

  The heat suffocation of six campesinos in the California desert was tragic enough before reporter Ray Myers discovers 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 psychotic plan to snuff everyone related to the smuggling operation, including now a pesky reporter who keeps sniffing 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 a ruthless Mexican trafficker who has hijacked 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.

My Novels:  BABY LOVE,   Year of the Monkey,    The Courage to Kill,   THE SUM OF HIS WORTH


        Read chapters by clicking title under SELECTED WORKS



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 murder 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 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." -- the late 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



THE COURAGE TO KILL -- a psychological thriller as chilling and suspenseful as "SEVEN"



EXCERPT -- The Courage to Kill
   “When … when I was a child, my father …” She averted her eyes. “Do you know what I’m saying? … I had gone to confront him. It was the second time and he did the same thing again— He refused to accept responsibility—”
  She stopped. She knew they wouldn’t understand.
  Det. Pedroza groaned, growing restless. Both men shuffled their feet.
  Jay could see it coming. They were about to tell her she was under arrest. She said in a pinched, quaking voice, “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
  The detectives exchanged glances.
  “Your father’s body was discovered late last night,” Pedroza said. “Intended to look like suicide.... Ms Parrish, do you own a handgun?”



   This edgy Southern thriller pulsates with violence, love, betrayal and humor as seen through the eyes of an adventurous white teenager during the great cultural revolution of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s.


Excerpt from THE SUM OF HIS WORTH
   He wasn’t a mystery to me anymore. Now I could see who and what he really was. He was strange; he was flawed. But none of that mattered because he had grown way beyond civil concern, way beyond me and even himself. He’d been right about me, I did not matter, nor did we together; he, Doctor Joe, did not matter. It was the cause that moved him, that was him now. He needed to do this more than he needed to love, to live. And that’s why he had no fear of the lurking harm ready to wipe him away.