Marshall Keys, PhD
"A real page-turner...Turnbull has a terrific eye for detail and genuinely makes the reader care about his characters."

LTC Ron Stephens, U.S. Army
"This is a great book--caring, compassionate. Phillip Turner is our hero."

The State newspaper, Columbia, S.C.
"A well-paced first novel..will hold the reader's attention from beginning to end."

 

Book Description
Some promises are meant to be kept...

The Vietnam War is only a fading memory for former Air Force sergeant Phillip Turner who now leads a simple life with his wife and 7-year-old son on their small Georgia farm. Then one day he spots a photograph in the local newspaper that turns his whole world upside down.

The man in the photo is none other than Colonel Chu, the notorious South Vietnamese Army officer who gunned down Phillip's friend, a 7-year-old boy named Gum, in cold blood almost three decades earlier. On that day in 1973 Phillip made a vow: Someday he would make the colonel pay.

Now that day has come.

The sight of Colonel Chu's smiling face in the photo sends Phillip spiraling out of control. Plagued by nightmares and obsessed with revenge, Phillip forsakes his job and family and embarks on a perilous mission to find and destroy Chu. His task won't be easy. Colonel Chu is now a rich and powerful U.S. citizen with deep ties to the CIA, State Department and a sinister underworld drug cartel.

Gum's Story is more than a story about the Vietnam War. It's about a promise made to a dying boy almost thirty years earlier, a little boy who dreamed of going to America and whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gum's Story is also about one common man's search for absolution and sanity as he risks all--even his own life--to avenge an innocent friend's death.

Rick Turnbull, who began writing under Eliot Wigginton at the Foxfire School, knows how to engage a reader and make him care deeply about joining Phillip Turner's whirling quest for truth, justice and freedom from the past. >From the first page, the reader is drawn into this tightly woven tale of suspense and intrigue in a way that will not allow him to put the book down until it reaches its inexorable and shattering conclusion.