The Jolly Zebra

What makes a romance novel a romance? Writing a well-structured romance isn't the same as writing any other genre - something the popular novel and screenwriting guides don't address. The romance arc is made up of its own story beats. Told in conversational (and often irreverent) prose, Romancing the Beat is like sitting down to coffee with romance editor and author Gwen Hayes while she explains story structure - the way she does with her clients, some of whom are regular inhabitants of the best-seller lists.

In the blistering heat of the Sudan, the CIA has gone rogue. On the trail of a notorious terrorist, Agency operatives have overstepped their sanctioned boundaries. And now the ultimate weapon has fallen into the wrong hands.

When the U.S. develops intelligence showing that Iran is in the final stages of assembling a nuclear bomb, the President orders Breanna Stockard and the Whiplash team to destroy it before the renegade nation can destabilize the shaky Middle East. Left with no other choice, Stockard sends young Air Force ace Turk Mako behind enemy lines. His orders: pilot a squadron of high-tech nano-UAVs from inside Iran to destroy the weapon and its assembly bunker. Turk and his accompanying Delta Force team succeed, only to discover another site and another device.

In 1714, England's Parliament offered a huge reward to anyone whose method of measuring longitude could be proven successful. The scientific establishment--from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton--had mapped the heavens in its certainty of a celestial answer. In stark contrast, one man, John Harrison, dared to imagine a mechanical solution--a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had been able to do on land. And the race was on....