Squint [Paperback]

Michael Gabriele (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 29, 2001

It moves through space, covering five black miles every second. Its brain, a multiprocessing supercomputer; its heart, a digital imaging relay system. And its eyes. Eyes so powerful that Squint 11 has become the worlds most covert spy satellite.But Squint is new, and is still being tested by NSA engineer Drew Montana and software contractor Laura Robbins. Their job; test and evaluate the satellite, but do not explore. That will be the National Reconnaissance Offices job in a matter of weeks. But while testing Squint over a civilian target, its eyes see more than random buildings, vehicles and people. It sees murder. The concealed assassination of the republican candidate for president.The hit is quick, isolated, and well planned, away from the public eye and the watchful probe of authorities. But not hidden from the vigilant eyes of Squint more than a hundred miles overhead.Suddenly armed with the most classified, implicit images ever taken from space, Drew and Laura find themselves faced with the decision of dumping the test from the main computer in accordance with NSA security code, or figuring a way to funnel the photographs to the most effective federal agents. When they choose to carefully set the incriminating pictures into motion through the system, the impossible happens. Elite officials are suddenly found dead inside the impregnable walls of the NSA.Their lives now targeted by some of the most powerful men in the world, Drew and Laura are on a race to stay alive, and at the same time struggling to find the truth, a truth that leads them to the highest ranks of organized crime, both government and mafia.With narrowing odds, the two computer analysts have no choice but to fight back, seek justice, and keep Squint 11 from being uncovered.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Hollywood Film Festival Discovery Award Winner!

About the Author

A graduate of Loyola College in Maryland, Michael Gabriele is a graphic designer and freelance writer, and has been the recipient of The Publisher's Excellence Award at The Baltimore Sun.

Product Details

• Paperback: 344 pages
• Publisher: iUniverse (April 29, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 059518040X
• ISBN-13: 978-0595180400
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,052,556 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars squint, August 6, 2001

By 

john coiley (baltimore, md United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Squint (Paperback)

Most compelling. Practically a sure bet to be grabbed by Hollywood. The subject is newsworthy big time - BIG BROTHER is watching. Are you kidding. How often has this subject been broached in your circle of friends and co-workers? Look for the movie.

5.0 out of 5 stars Squint, by Michael Gabriele is a real page turner., October 16, 2002

By 

Anthony J. Sacco (Pine Bluffs, Wyoming United States, author of The China Connection, Little Sister Lost, and Echoes in the Wind. My website @www.saccoservices.com,) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Squint (Paperback)

Moving through the silent void above planet Earth at five miles each second, KH1100, called Squint by its creators, is the world's newest, most covert spy satellite. Eons ahead of its contemporaries, when fully operational Squint will give America more than just the ability to track people on the ground. Its advanced design will allow real-time digital imagery from a remote planetary orbit that can relay pictures of objects the size of an orange in a picnic basket.

Drew Montana, a thirty-five year old engineer specializing in satellite telecommunications software at the top-secret National Security Agency, and Ted Pakula, his supervisor, are in charge of grass roots logistics for Squint.

While working out a minor camera enhancement problem in the software graphics program that is impeding receipt of clear final images from Squint, Montana and sexy Laura Robbins, a software analyst employed by a private contractor working on the project, decide to conduct a final test of Squint. Contrary to the rules, they monitor a civilian target; a rally at Baltimore's Convention Center featuring Peter Forster, Republican presidential candidate. Horrified, Drew and Laura are reluctant witnesses as Forster and his entourage are cut down in a hail of bullets fired by unknown assassins. Because their view is as clear as if they had been at the scene themselves, they can identify the perpetrators.

When Drew and Laura decide to show the Squint photos to Ted Pakula, people begin to die. First Ted himself is killed in his office. Then the body of Steve Su, a member of the National Council of Counter Intelligence, to whom Pakula showed the pictures, is found on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington.

Montana and Robbins, their love growing, do not know who is friend and who is foe as they try to unravel and expose a conspiracy with tentacles reaching all the way into the White house and members of the Mob.

Compounding the problem for Drew and Laura is the need to keep the Squint Project from becoming public knowledge while ferreting out the conspirators and protecting themselves from those who seek to keep their part in the vicious murders from being discovered.

In this novel, as in his first, "August in the Caribbean," Northwest Publishing, Inc., Salt Lake City, Utah), Mike Gabriele has constructed a dynamite plot guaranteed to keep you turning the pages to see what happens next. Drew Montana is a protagonist who is both likeable and believable. On the distaff side, Laura Robbins is a beautiful woman, intelligent, warm, sophisticated, yet vulnerable; a woman about whom every man dreams. As the story builds, so does the love of Drew and Laura for each other. Working together, they hatch a plot of their own to expose the killers and bring them to justice.

No wonder this novel won a Hollywood Film Festival Discovery Award, and received the Publisher's Excellence Award at the Baltimore Sun.