Journalist David Freed Pens a Thriller

Thursday,January 16, 2025 at 6PM

Chaucer’s Books hosts award-winning journalist and author David Freed for a book talk and signing of his latest novel Deep Fury.

A high-flying, high-octane thrill ride, Deep Fury is the long awaited seventh installment of the bestselling Cordell Logan Mysteries from author David Freed.

A naked man drops from the night sky and crashes through the roof of a mobile home, nearly killing the elderly couple inside. The victim is soon identified as Pete Hostetler, a well-respected executive at a California-based toy manufacturing company. But detectives are baffled, and there are no leads. Did he accidentally fall out of an airplane or was he pushed?

For Cordell Logan–a sardonic, financially struggling flight instructor and former government assassin–Hostetler’s death is personal. The two men were classmates at the US Air Force Academy and later served together as fighter pilots during Operation Desert Storm, where Hostetler saved Logan’s life during one particularly perilous combat mission in Iraq. Logan is convinced Pete was murdered. But who would’ve killed someone in such bizarre fashion, and why?

Determined to avenge his battle buddy’s death, Logan starts digging and discovers nothing is as it seems, and that he may not have known Hostetler as well as he thought. Soon a vexing trail of clues lead him and his aging Cessna, the Ruptured Duck, across California, deep into Mexico, and relentlessly into harm’s way.

The son of a street cop, David Freed was born in Georgia, grew up in Denver, and spent nearly two decades as an investigative journalist, mostly with The Los Angeles Times. He served as The Times’ lead police reporter, reported from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq during Operation Desert Storm, was named as an individual finalist for the Pulitzer Prize’s Gold Medal for Public Service, the highest award in American journalism, and shared in a Pulitzer for team coverage of the 1992 Rodney King riots.

David later worked as an investigator and associate field producer for CBS News before selling a screenplay to 20th Century Fox. He subsequently spent more than 10 years writing movies in Hollywood while also moonlighting within the federal intelligence community as an independent contractor, principally with the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency.

Since then, David has written extensively for national magazines, including Air & Space Smithsonian, where was a contributing editor, and the Atlantic, where his expose, “The Wrong Man,” was honored by the American Society of Magazine Editors as one of the year’s best feature stories.