Paul Draker - Best Selling Author of Gritty Modern Mystery Thrillers

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Paul Draker

Paul Draker writes tightly-plotted, gritty modern thrillers that combine a well-crafted mystery whodunit with gripping psychology and relentless suspense. Each novel is an immersive roller coaster thrill ride, filled with twists that keep the reader guessing, right up until the last page.

Writing and storytelling are nothing new for Paul. In sixth grade, when he was nine, a classmate liked a story he wrote, and took it home. The horrified parents called the school and demanded that whoever wrote it be sent to see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist asked Paul if he could keep a copy of the story... and then asked Paul to sign it for him.

Paul currently lives in Palo Alto, California, with his wife and three daughters. An avid scuba diver, he has spent much time underwater in Palau, Yap, Honduras, Thailand, Hawaii, the Florida Keys, the cenote caverns of the Yucatan, the Caribbean, the Virgin Islands, Caicos, and the "Red Triangle" off California's coast. He also enjoys skiing, swimming, and windsurfing, and has had extensive tactical training in firearms. After one too many high-speed motorcycle crashes, he is no longer allowed to own open-class sportbikes, which is probably a good thing for him and everyone else.

Paul has worked in the aerospace/defense industry on a variety of classified and unclassified programs for DARPA, Navy, Army, and Marine Corps, ranging from strategic national missile systems to technology augmentation for small-team tactical infantry units. He has also led a Silicon Valley technology startup delivering massively-scalable custom Internet software to Fortune 500 clients including Hewlett Packard and Robert Half International, and headed a leading videogame studio developing mobile games for top-tier publishers such as EA, Disney/Pixar, Sega, Warner Brothers, THQ, and Glu. He holds advanced degrees in electrical and aerospace engineering from MIT, Stanford, and U.C. Berkeley. This broad-ranging engineering expertise lends impeccable technical authenticity to his stories.

  • About Paul

    “I always feel a little thrill when I realize that the author already has all the essential qualities—the ones nobody can teach.”

    -Michael Carr
    Editor of 5 NYT and International Bestsellers
    including Brad Meltzer's NYT #3 Bestseller The Zero Game

Contact Paul

Email

pauldraker [at] gmail [dot] com

Postal Mail

Paul Draker
c/o Mayhem Press LLC
380 Hamilton Ave #1319
Palo Alto, California 94301

Online Bookstores

Paul's Amazon Author Page
Paul's B & N Nook Author Page

Social Networks

Paul's Goodreads Author Page
@pauldraker on Twitter
pauldrakerbooks on Facebook

Contact Paul

New Year Island

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Camilla Becker is a survivor.
The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake took her parents from her when she was seven and left her buried under a collapsed freeway. Twenty three years later, she's a producer of acclaimed animated films for children and runs a foundation to brighten orphans' lives. The invitation to be a contestant in a new reality show is not really Camilla's thing, but the studio promises funding and publicity for her charity.

Ten strangers meet aboard a luxury megayacht in San Francisco. They come from all walks of life and very different backgrounds. The show's hosts screened thousands of possible candidates in utmost secrecy before choosing these specific ten.

Their destination is an island off the coast of California, abandoned for decades, where nature's own grand spectacle of survival plays out year after year. An island that has already claimed lives.

The contestants will be marooned, cut off from all other human contact for two weeks, to compete for the five million dollar grand prize.

But nothing is what it seems. Everyone is hiding secrets. And each of them has, in their past, already survived something that would kill most people.

Now they find themselves trapped in a game where the stakes are even higher. Camilla must choose whom to trust as they are forced to confront each other, their own darkest impulses, and nature in violent revolt against a game so deadly that the most terrifying experiences of their lives were only its qualifying round.

Maybe there isn't meant to be a winner…


Pyramid Lake

eBook Edition

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Maverick computer scientist Trevor Lennox is the most brilliant programmer of his generation. He's also equally talented at making enemies. Exiled to a Top Secret government lab hidden in the heart of Nevada's Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation, twenty-eight year old Trevor has spent the last four years working 24/7, leading a classified DARPA project which uses high-speed cameras and a supercomputer's limitless processing power to interpret human facial microexpressions with unprecedented precision.

Frankenstein, Trevor's custom-built hundred-million-dollar supercomputer, can detect lies or concealed emotions with infallible accuracy. It can read hidden intentions right off a person's face. Trevor has his own plans for the groundbreaking technology he has created—an agenda which might be very different from what the government has in mind.

Increasingly at odds with the other three DARPA scientists who lead Pyramid Lake's advanced-robotics projects, Trevor is assigned a new and unwanted project co-lead. Cassie Winnemucca, the descendant of Paiute tribal chiefs, is a gifted computer-science prodigy like Trevor himself. But is she his future replacement?

Trevor prepares to struggle to retain control of his own project. But first, he must find a way to help his equally brilliant but troubled seven-year-old daughter Amy, whose problems threaten to condemn her to a terrifying future.

When a series of grisly murders sows chaos throughout the DARPA facility, Trevor realizes he’s not the only one with a hidden agenda.

Luckily, Trevor’s no stranger to conflict. To win, he’ll fight whomever he has to, however he has to. He'll use every tool at his disposal to get to the truth and to help his daughter. But this time, he’s fighting to protect everyone and everything he cares about. Unknown forces have their own plans for his face-reading technology, and they are willing to kill for it.

Mount Terror

Mount Terror is the sequel to Pyramid Lake.
Trevor Lennox is back...

Coming in 2016

Antarctica is the most remote and hostile environment on Earth. No one lives there. The tiny, transient population of visitors consists almost entirely of scientists. Antarctica's utter isolation and unique international legal status make it the ideal place to push back the boundaries of modern medicine.

Dr. Jason Curtis is a scientific visionary, funded by a top-secret government grant and given unprecedented autonomy in the research he oversees at a hidden facility in Antarctica. His pioneering medical research combines stem cells and gene therapy to achieve near-miraculous breakthroughs in human healing. An undisputed genius, the unorthodox and secretive Curtis is also iconoclastic and notoriously unmanageable.

With the six-month darkness of Antarctic winter closing in, Dr. Curtis's lead supercomputer scientist vanishes. Despite Curtis's demands for a replacement, his U.S. Government sponsor suspects that something may have gone very wrong. Any heavy-handed inquiry will likely backfire, however, and the Department of Defense cannot risk Curtis going renegade.

Fortunately there is someone who can infiltrate Curtis's team: a brilliant programmer with a nose for trouble and a checkered past, who now lives in exile in Mexico...

But will sending in Trevor Lennox to replace Curtis's missing computer scientist make things infinitely worse?

Oil Dale

Oil Dale is a Trevor Lennox prequel.

Coming in 2016

Everybody comes from somewhere... including Trevor Lennox.

Seventeen-year-old Trevor's an '08er—from Oildale, an unincorporated area in the white-trash armpit of California that not even the neighboring city of Bakersfield wants to claim. The ‘Dale’s a place that looks more like Iraq than Southern California, with a colorful legacy of bigotry, poverty, hatred, and violence that dates back a century. Oildale’s Kern River eats gangbangers: the only time their bodies turn up is when searchers are busy looking for other bodies...

The 'Dale's always been a rough place to grow up—especially for an intelligent teenager who calls it like he sees it and has never learned how to walk away from a fight. But now mobile-home drug labs are multiplying in the shadow of the bobbing oil derricks, and the Oildale Pecker Woods and Nazi Lowriders are battling for control of Beardsley Street's lucrative meth trade. Trevor wants out, and he's smart enough to still have a shot at getting into MIT. All he's got to do first is to somehow make up for twelve wasted years of school.

When he tries to help a friend in need, Trevor soon finds himself facing a far more lethal degree of trouble than he's used to. But once an '08er, always an '08er… Trevor lives by his own code. When someone walks all over you, you fight back. And to win, you fight dirty.

Trevor may want to erase his past, but he's got to survive it first...

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “A twisty, engaging thriller featuring well-developed characters. A reality show becomes a test of survival for 10 strangers stranded on a small island in Draker's debut thriller. ...Draker has ample room to develop his cast, which he does effortlessly; ...it's easy to root for their survival in this story about the terrifying things that desperate people can do..”

    —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “New Year Island is a page-turner, with more twists than a den of snakes. In fact, I can safely say that it’s the most exciting, most promising work of fiction to cross my desk in the past year. It’s fast moving and unpredictable, with distinctive characters, gripping images, nice, apt touches of humor, and plot twists we never see coming.”

    —Michael Carr, Editor of 5 NYT and International Bestsellers, including Brad Meltzer's NYT #3 Bestseller The Zero Game

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “...one of the most thrilling and nuanced books that I've read in the past several years. Meticulous yet effortless, this book is literature that will stand up to the test of time.”

    —Madeline, Top 500 Amazon Reviewer

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “Brilliant psychological thriller... New Year Island is dark, intelligent, with an intriguing and captivating plot.”

    —Edward Shook, Amazon Reviewer

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “...might easily be a best seller. It's that good.”

    —Brent Butler, Top 500 Amazon Reviewer

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “This is one book I would love to see made into a TV series... the big screen couldn't do it justice.”

    —kirkley60, Barnes & Noble Reviewer

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “As a whodunit, New Year Island ranks up there with Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians.”

    —Robin Landry, Top 500 Amazon Reviewer

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “…totally captivating… It lures the reader in and then slams the door shut.”

    —gobirds2, Top 1000 Amazon Reviewer

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “Every once in a while, you come across a book that stands out from all the others...and New Year Island is one of these... it's an experience you won't soon forget.”

    —terrylynn, Amazon Reviewer

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “...nearly impossible to set down...awfully, awfully good and shamefully good fun.”

    —T J McCarthy, Top 1000 Amazon Reviewer

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “...exceedingly well written...wonderfully horrific...This doesn't read like a first novel, but rather like one written by a pro who has been at this for a long time.”

    —James Tepper, Top 1000 Amazon Reviewer

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “...one of the best books I've read in at least the last year.”

    —Cheryl Stout, Top 1000 Amazon Reviewer

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “…WOW! This is one crazy, intense ride! Read this book, but plan on not getting anything else done until you finish it.”

    —Savmom, Barnes & Noble Reviewer

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “...one of the most riveting books I've read in the last few years.”

    —Kristen Johnson, Goodreads Reviewer

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “The emotional content is well wrought, the characters’ motivations, anxieties, fears, and phobias all quite believable. Draker keeps a lot of psychological balls in the air beautifully. These people are believable, which is what makes the whole thing so scary.”

    -Michael Carr, Editor of 5 NYT and International Bestsellers, including Brad Meltzer's NYT #3 Bestseller The Zero Game

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “If you like thrillers, you owe it to yourself to read this book.”

    -Veronica Shawcroft, Goodreads Reviewer

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “This is one you don't want to miss.”

    —OutlawPoet, Top 1000 Amazon Reviewer

  • Advance Feedback
    on
    Pyramid Lake

    "If Trevor Lennox even looked at me, I'd probably move to another State."

    -Anonymous Critique Partner

  • New Year Island
    Reviews

    “New Year Island has a plot that’s crackling with energy, with well-crafted action scenes, wry humor, and some lovely sensory imagery. The unpredictability throughout is just terrific. . . . I really do think Draker has a winner here his first time out.”

    -Michael Carr, Editor of 5 NYT and International Bestsellers, including Brad Meltzer's NYT #3 Bestseller The Zero Game

  • Advance Feedback
    on
    Pyramid Lake

    "Megalomaniac. Sociopath. Menace to Society. And I'm only talking about your story's good guy.

    -Anonymous Beta Reader

  • Advance Feedback
    on
    Pyramid Lake

    "Do you really need SO MANY PEOPLE to die so violently? Yeah, I know Shakespeare did it. But I'm afraid people will read this not for its characterization but for the thrill of the violence, like a videogame or violent movie."

    -Anonymous Beta Reader

  • Ten survivors who beat the odds are recruited for a reality show so deadly that the most terrifying experiences of their lives were only its qualifying round...