Dylan Taggart channels his demons through the keyboard. Knocked around by a father who believed weakness was failure, the bestselling suspense author grabs a measure of peace in his gorgeous girlfriendโs arms. But he sees fiction come horrifyingly to life when masked fanatics break in demanding he put his brilliant mind to work and help them steal a secret military super-weapon.
Dylan tries to refuse, but his resolve shatters when they leave his lover for dead and punish him mercilessly. Torn between terror and grief, he starts writing the heist scheme as orderedโฆwhile feverishly building a cunningly disguised sabotage.
Can this tortured artist use his own ingenious plotting skills to prevent the death of millions?
Plot/Counterplotย is a fast-paced standalone thriller. If you like resourceful characters, intense drama, and endless surprises, then youโll adore William Bernhardtโs clever caper.
โA man on the run... a woman on the run... in a thriller that hits the ground running... then running faster... then absolutely flying. And you're flying, too, flying through the pages with one of the masters of the modern thriller at the controls. William Bernhardt knows when to soar and when to dive, when to make you sweat and when to let you breathe, when to throw this flying machine into a barrel roll that will absolutely shock you and when to bring you home safe and satisfied. A terrific entertainment.โ -- William Martin,ย New York Times-Bestselling Author ofย The Lincoln Letterย andย December '41ย ย
William Bernhardt is the author of over fifty books, including The Last Chance Lawyer (#1 National Bestseller), the historical novels Challengers of the Dust and Nemesis, two books of poetry, and the Red Sneaker books on writing. In addition, Bernhardt founded the Red Sneaker Writers Center to mentor aspiring authors. The Center hosts an annualย conference (WriterCon), small-group seminars, a newsletter, and a bi-weekly podcast.ย
Bernhardt has received the Southern Writers Guildโs Gold Medal Award, the Royden B. Davis Distinguished Author Award (University of Pennsylvania) and the H. Louise Cobb Distinguished Author Award (Oklahoma State), which is given "in recognition of an outstanding body of work that has profoundly influenced the way in which we understand ourselves and American society at large." In 2019, he received the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book.
In addition Bernhardt has written plays, a musical (book and score), humor, children stories, biography, and puzzles. He has edited two anthologies (Legal Briefs and Natural Suspect) as fundraisers for The Nature Conservancy and the Childrenโs Legal Defense Fund. In his spare time, he has enjoyed surfing, digging for dinosaurs, trekking through the Himalayas, paragliding, scuba diving, caving, zip-lining over the canopy of the Costa Rican rain forest, and jumping out of an airplane at 10,000 feet.ย
In 2017, when Bernhardt delivered the keynote address at the San Francisco Writers Conference, chairman Michael Larsen noted that in addition to penning novels, Bernhardt can โwrite a sonnet, play a sonata, plant a garden, try a lawsuit, teach a class, cook a gourmet meal, beat you at Scrabble, and work the New York Times crossword in under five minutes.โ