Amanda Matti: Author, Veteran

Chapter 2 Elora pulled into the parking lot of the CIA headquarters outside Langley, Virginia. Nick followed behind her in his car; the two were coming from Brendan’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. Nick had urged Elora to go home after the funeral but she flat-out refused. “If I go home right now and sit alone in my house, I’ll go fucking crazy,” she’d told him. “I want to work—I need to work. I can’t rest until I know the assholes responsible for Brendan’s death are in prison or dead, preferably the latter. The NDU Task Force still has a job to finish. You and I both know Malik Khalid wasn’t killed in the raid. We don’t know for sure if he was even there that night. We still have work to do, and I will not stop until that son of a bitch is brought down.” Nick didn’t have the heart to tell Elora there had already been talk of dissolving the CIA’s NDU Task Force, of which he was the team leader, and Elora, along with three other analysts, were members. “Okay, let’s go to w

Chapter 1 CIA Analyst Elora Monro stood on the tarmac of Dover Air Force Base awaiting the arrival of a C-17 cargo plane bearing the remains of her fiancé, U.S. Army Major Brendan Jacobs. Her friend and colleague, fellow CIA Analyst Nick Hildebrandt, stood next to her. Nick had also been close friends with Brendan, he was even slated to be one of the groomsmen in Elora and Brendan’s upcoming wedding. Now, instead of marrying Brendan, Elora was burying him. She and Nick stared silently off into Delaware’s gray March sky—watching, listening. They heard a low rumble begin to approach from the east and looked up just in time to see the C-17 break through the cloud cover. As the plane dipped its wings to circle the airfield and line up for landing, Nick placed a supportive hand on Elora’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Are you okay?” “Nope,” Elora replied, feeling her chest tighten as she struggled to maintain her composure. Nick didn’t press further but kept his hand on he

The COVID-19 quarantine has put the publishing of my latest book, NEW DAWN UNDERGROUND, on hold, so I have decided to start sharing chapters here on my blog to give my followers (all six of you - LOL) a jump on reading it for FREE! CIA analyst Elora Monro is devastated. Her Delta Force fiancé was just killed during a failed raid on a terrorist compound in northern Iraq. Now, Elora is hellbent on tracking down the mastermind behind the Islamic militant group responsible for her fiancé’s death — the New Dawn Underground. Posing as a Washington Post correspondent, Elora travels to the Middle East and embeds with the New Dawn militants under the guise of helping the group tell their side of the story to Western media. Driven by vengeance, Elora strives to gain enough intel while on the inside to destroy New Dawn from the inside out. Prepared to sacrifice her life to accomplish her mission, Elora is wholly unprepared for the enigmatic Zaidan Al-Sadiq, right-hand-man to the militant group’s

A Foreign Affair  is a sweeping Iraq War memoir that chronicles the forbidden romance between a female U.S. service member and her Iraqi translator, who meet while serving together on the front lines of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  In the summer of 2005, U.S. Navy intel analyst Amanda Matti deployed to Baghdad to serve as a Foreign Affairs Liaison Officer within the new Iraqi National Intelligence Service. The INIS was established and overseen by the CIA, and Amanda’s mission was to help strengthen relations between the new Iraqi government and U.S. intelligence personnel. A few days after her arrival in country, Amanda was introduced to Fadi, who was assigned to serve as her translator for the duration of her deployment. Over the next few months, Amanda and Fadi forged a close friendship while working round-the-clock together at the INIS building. Three months into Amanda’s deployment, she, Fadi, and a handful of others from their department were sent on a covert forward deploy