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Anthony J. Tata, otherwise known as A.J. Tata, is an American speaker, national security expert and national bestselling author of mystery and thriller novels.

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, he holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Military Academy, as well as two master’s degrees; one in Operational planning from the U.S. Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies, and the other in International relations from the Catholic University of America.

A retired Brigadier General in the U.S. Army who most recently performed the duties of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Tata was also a distinguished national security fellow at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University.

Throughout his illustrious military career, he led various commands within the 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, and 10th Mountain Divisions. Additionally, Tata also played vital roles in military operations spanning across Afghanistan, Bosnia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Panama, and Haiti.

In his civilian life, he operates a consulting firm known as Tata Leadership Group, which provides expert guidance to companies focused on a range of defense-related technologies.

A guest commentator with over 1,000 appearances on several popular cable news programs, Tata often offers insightful analysis and commentary on matters pertaining to foreign policy.

More about A.J. Tata

Genres: Mystery, Thriller

Born: 1959

United States

Website: https://ajtata.com/

Garrett Sinclair

  1. Chasing the Lion (2021)
  2. Total Empire (2023)
  3. The Phalanx Code (2024)

Jake Mahegan

  1. Foreign and Domestic (2015)
  2. Three Minutes to Midnight (2016)
  3. Besieged (2017)
  4. Direct Fire (2017)
  5. Dark Winter (2018)
  6. Double Crossfire (2019)

Sniper (Co-authored with Nicholas Irving)

  1. Reaper: Ghost Target (2018)
  2. Reaper: Threat Zero (2019)
  3. Reaper: Drone Strike (2020)

Threat

  1. Sudden Threat (2008)
  2. Rogue Threat (2009)
  3. Hidden Threat (2011)
  4. Mortal Threat (2015)

Detailed book overview

Garrett Sinclair

Chasing the Lion

Parizad rose through his nation’s military to become a lethal soldier and brilliant tactical commander. Now a general, he leads Quds Force, an extremist terrorist organization targeting America and its western allies.

The United States has just uncovered a biochemical weapon developed by Parizad’s group. A viral agent, it attacks a person’s nervous system and renders them susceptible to mind control. Parizad plans to unleash the weapon in Washington D. C. on Inauguration Day during the swearing in of the country’s first female president, turning civilians into weapons.

Army Lieutenant General Garrett Sinclair and his Joint Special Operations team are assigned to stop the terrorist strike. Sinclair pursues Parizad across the Middle East, Europe, and in the U.S., only to discover a deeper conspiracy—a revelation that his wife may not have died from cancer but was murdered. Separated from his teammates and unsure of who he can trust, Sinclair is on a mission not only to save his country, but to avenge his family.

Author: A.J. Tata
First Release: 2021
Ebook: B08FZ8B1JQ
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Empire

When Sergeant Major Sylvester “Sly” Morgan is killed on a mission, his daughter, Zoey, tells General Garrett Sinclair that her father's death wasn’t random. Morgan had recorded a high-level meeting between Chinese, American, and French diplomats as they spoke about a plan for a new global government.

The “Chinese-U.S. Partnership”, or CUSP, intends to combine the world’s two largest economies and militaries to usher in a new era of partnership and leadership. But China’s offer has a deadline and penalties for noncompliance. As a safeguard, China has five high-tech hypersonic glide vehicles armed with nuclear weapons orbiting the earth ready to strike. When Zoey disappears in Africa, seemingly while in pursuit of her father’s killer, Sinclair and Dagger Team are caught off-guard as they scramble to catch up.

Without authorization or support from his government, Sinclair takes his team into the maw of the Saharan death pit, the Eye of Africa. In what will prove to be his most dangerous mission yet, Sinclair must overcome tremendous odds, with the threat of nuclear Armageddon hanging in the balance.

Author: A.J. Tata
First Release: 2023
Ebook: B09Y451R6V
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
The Phalanx Code

Garrett Sinclair escapes from prison to rescue his team from the manipulations of two tech moguls and learns of a devastating family secret in the process.

Influential tech magnate Mitch Drewson calls on Sinclair and the Dagger team to protect his Project Optimus. An ambitious endeavor to empower citizens to protect financial and personal data in the face of increasingly authoritarian federal governments, Project Optimus is a threat to Aurelius Blanc’s Phalanx Corporation. Blanc’s data collection and media application is enabling a global security state through partnerships with the major industrialized nations, creating a technofascism that monitors the activity of everyone with a smartphone, tablet, computer, or any web connected device.

When Phalanx assassin squads overrun an Optimus server farm in California and attack an Optimus coder named Blair Campbell, Sinclair must deploy the troops that Drewson has marshalled to save Blair and protect the remainder of the Optimus team so they can finish their important work—which includes deciphering the mysterious Phalanx Code, suspected to be Phalanx’ kill list of Optimus employees.

With Phalanx squads hunting him and those he loves, Sinclair must determine who he can trust while a part of his past comes back to haunt him and threaten everything he holds dear.

Author: A.J. Tata
First Release: 2024
Ebook: B0C1X7HLFS
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Jake Mahegan

Foreign and Domestic

One year ago, Captain Jake Mahegan led a Delta Force team into Afghanistan to capture an American traitor working for the Taliban. The mission ended in tragedy. The team was infiltrated and decimated by a bomb. An enemy prisoner was killed. Mahegan was dismissed from service—dishonored forever. 

Now, haunted by the incident, Mahegan is determined to clear his name. The military wants him to stand down. But when the American Taliban returns to domestic soil—headed by the traitor who ruined his life—Mahegan is the only man who knows how to stop him. Outside the law. Under the radar. Out for vengeance…

Author: A.J. Tata
First Release: 2015
Ebook: B00M4ASRMW
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Three Minutes to Midnight

One Army geologist is kidnapped—on U.S. soil.

Two nuclear plants are attacked—in a matter of days.

No American is safe—from the next, and final, wave of terror.

Enter Jake Mahegan, a Delta Force veteran

on the most important mission of his life.

If he fails, our nation falls.

The countdown is launched. The clock is ticking.

Armageddon begins . . . Three Minutes to Midnight.

Author: A.J. Tata
First Release: 2016
Ebook: B01ND0RRY8
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Besieged

It starts with the unthinkable. A school under siege. A shooter in the classroom. A nightmare scenario that has become all too common in today’s United States. But this time, former Delta Captain Jake Mahegan is there when it happens.

Checking in on the schoolteacher daughter of a colleague, Mahegan finds himself face to face with a merciless gunman rigged as a suicide bomber. Without warning, the school is attacked from the outside as well—and all hell breaks loose. The teacher shoots the gunman, Mahegan is knocked unconscious, and a twelve-year-old autistic girl named Misha is kidnapped.

When the smoke clears, Mahegan is left with a long list of unanswered questions—and a deeply personal mission to rescue Misha. Racing against the clock, his search will take him from the tech-fueled think-tanks of a North Carolina factory to the top-secret nerve centers of embedded Iranian agents. It’s all part of a bigger, darker conspiracy that’s taking domestic terrorism to a whole new level. And it’s up to Mahegan to stop what could be the most devastating attack in U.S. history . . .

Author: A.J. Tata
First Release: 2017
Ebook: B077M17RFJ
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Direct Fire

A powerful banker, gunned down in cold blood. A military family, senselessly slaughtered as they sleep. A key general, kidnapped from his farm near Fort Bragg. Atrocities like these are all too common in the Middle East. But this is the United States of America . . .

Time is running out for Jake Mahegan. Terrorist cells are gathering in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Hackers are emptying the nation’s banks. And their final act of vengeance will bring the whole world to its knees. For Mahegan, it’s time to kill. Now.

Author: A.J. Tata
First Release: 2017
Ebook: B07HLVGSJK
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Dark Winter

The world order is being hacked to pieces . . . 

By the time anyone realizes what’s happening, it is too late. A dark network of hackers has infiltrated the computers of the U.S. military, unleashing chaos across the globe. U.S. missiles strike the wrong targets. Defense systems fail. Power grids shut down. Within hours, America’s enemies move in. Russian tanks plow through northern Europe. Iranian troops invade Iraq. North Korea destroys Seoul and fires missiles at Japan.

Phase 1 of ComWar is complete. 

Enter Jake Mahegan and his team. Their mission: locate the nerve center of ComWar—aka Computer Optimized Warfare—and shut down the operation through any means necessary. There are three ComWar headquarters, each hidden deep underground in Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Each contains a human biometric nuclear key that the team must capture to shut down the imminent nuclear strikes. Splitting up the team is Mahegan’s only chance to prevent the next wave of cyber attacks. But even that won’t stop the sleeper cell agents—here in the United States . . . 

When Phase 2 ends, World War III begins.

Author: A.J. Tata
First Release: 2018
Ebook: B07Y5SPD3S
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Double Crossfire

President By Any Means Necessary

Despite the election results, losing candidate Jamie Carter refuses to accept businessman and political newbie Jack Smart as her president. In fact, Carter is determined to take her rightful place in the White House—by any means necessary. Once she maneuvers her way into the Senate, only three people stand in her way: the Speaker of the House, the Vice President, and the President himself...

The countdown begins. The assassins are ready. But when one of them tries to kill the CIA Director under Jake Mahegan’s watch, the plan is momentarily derailed. Jake is able to prevent one murder—but the conspiracy is too big, and too insidious, to stop now. Senator Jamie Carter is the mastermind behind one of the bloodiest coups ever conceived. Her highly trained killers are closing in on all the president’s men. And the course of American history will be changed forever—on Assassination Day . . .

Author: A.J. Tata
First Release: 2019
Ebook: B07NCRH91N
Publisher: Kensington

Sniper (Co-authored with Nicholas Irving)

Reaper: Ghost Target

American hero, or unhinged vigilante?

In Reaper: Ghost Target, Vick "The Reaper" Harwood is an esteemed sniper with a record kill count—33 kills in 90 days—when he is knocked out under mortar attack in Afghanistan. He wakes up back in the United States with little memory of what happened, his spotter and gun both unrecovered from the battlefield. Harwood has resigned himself to slowly picking up the pieces of his life, training Special Forces snipers in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and starting a promising relationship with an Olympic medalist named Jackie.

But when a series of assassinations start occurring in the area, Harwood can't explain why he just happens to be nearby for each killing—or how a sniper rifle that matches the description of the one he lost seems to be involved. His memory of the past few days is hazy and full of blackouts, and even he has to wonder, is he being framed? Or is he the killer?

As Harwood runs from the authorities, his girlfriend falls off the radar, his missing spotter resurfaces, and the assassinated men are outed as drug and sex traffickers. Nothing is adding up. Harwood realizes he has to unravel this mystery, and fast, or find himself paying the ultimate price for crimes he may not have committed.

Author: A.J. Tata
First Release: 2018
Ebook: B076H757HQ
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Reaper: Threat Zero

A convoy of cars carrying several family members of the President’s cabinet to Camp David for “Family Day” is ambushed, killing and wounding wives, husbands and children.

Immediately in the aftermath, Vick Harwood watches a Facebook live feed of his former ranger buddy Sammie Samuelson’s apparent suicide and confession in his Thurmont, Maryland apartment, just one mile from Camp David. Remnants of a firefight are in the background: sniper rifle, rocket launchers, and ammunition. Simultaneously, an intruder breaks into Harwood’s house.

Harwood arrives in Thurman to investigate the suicide and, with the help of attractive FBI agent Valerie Hinojosa, traces evidence left by Samuelson to a fiendish plot involving transnational terrorists and domestic political opponents.

Meanwhile, the president wants retribution, and will stop at nothing to get it. Harwood joins Team Valid, whose mission is to kill the family members of terrorists and eliminate their seed from the earth. Team Valid, consisting of Hinojosa, Harwood, a Navy SEAL sniper, and a Marine Force Recon sniper, travels to Crimea, Iran, and Azerbaijan before realizing the mission is not what it seems. 

Harwood struggles to balance his orders with his sense of right and wrong—without losing his life in the process. As Samuelson is implicated in the Camp David ambush, it is a race to protect his remaining family and uncover the sinister plot in the homeland.

Author: A.J. Tata
First Release: 2019
Ebook: B07J4Z6JF4
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Reaper: Drone Strike

On a classified mission to help the Israeli Defense Forces stop a Syrian and Hezbollah invasion to seize the Golan Heights, Ranger sniper Vick Harwood and his spotter go deep undercover. Operating with limited support from the American and Israeli governments, Vick is out on the edge.

Alessandra Cavezza, Director of Operations in Syria for the Italian UN Commission for Refugees, is moving families out of an embattled neighborhood. The nearly vacant suburb has been a haven for anti-Assad forces, ISIS militants, and Russian private military contractors. As she crawls into the basement of a home to help find a young girl’s doll, she finds a secret room that has detailed descriptions of unthinkable attacks on the United States, and falls into the hands of a madman: Jasar Tankian, Lebanese mastermind behind the plots.

As Syrian tanks attempt to push through Israeli defenses at the border, Team Reaper picks off Syrian tank commanders as they battle Israeli tanks, jets, and infantrymen. Combat intensifies as Vick goes black on ammunition. Commandeering a cargo drone to deliver Team Reaper to a landing zone near the coordinates, Vick becomes Alessandra’s—and America’s—only hope for survival.

Author: A.J. Tata
First Release: 2020
Ebook: B07ZBW8JZ3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Threat

Sudden Threat

In December 2001, CIA paramilitary operative Matt Garrett is mysteriously pulled from Pakistan as he closes in for the kill of Al Qaeda senior leadership and is reassigned to a low-profile mission in the Philippines. But as he sifts through the wreckage of a downed C-130 in the tangled jungle, he finds a dead U.S. Special Forces paratrooper who is not supposed to be there. He is quickly thrown into a contest of wits and resiliency in the uncharted rainforests of Mindanao.

Manipulated by the secret plans of a powerful quartet of upper-echelon Washington, D.C. defense politicos who call themselves the Rolling Stones, Matt and Zach Garrett establish their bona fides as true patriots on the cutting edge of freedom. They struggle for survival against the rising tide of Islamic extremism and the reemergence of the Empire of the Sun in the ever-expanding Global War on Terror.

Author: A.J. Tata
First Release: 2008
ISBN: 978-1514812785
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Rogue Threat

When a fleet of unmanned aerial drones disappears, the U.S. Vice President turns to Matt Garrett, still nursing the wounds he suffered in the Philippines. As Matt leaps into action, a terrorist commandeers Garrett's jet and a former Iraqi General with a startling link to Garrett's brother emerges from hiding. 

Matt discovers that international terrorists have kidnapped the world's leading expert on nanotechnology, who has enabled the missing Predators to locate, track, swarm, and kill...all by themselves. 

Meanwhile, the enemy has launched a flurry of attacks throughout America's heartland. The country is on edge as citizens wonder whether the terrorists have the capacity to deal a devastating blow with weapons of mass destruction. But Garrett is beginning to suspect that the true enemy may be all too close to home.

Author: A.J. Tata
First Release: 2009
ISBN: 978-1508410065
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Hidden Threat

When Special Forces Colonel Zachary Garrett leads a team of commandos into an enemy base-camp inside forbidden Pakistan territory, the ensuing combat destroys his helicopter and all its occupants. After military officers notify his estranged daughter, 17-year-old Amanda Garrett, of her father's death, she is apathetic until they mention a $500,000 life insurance payout. But there's a catch: before she can collect her cash, Amanda must visit revered psychiatrist Riley Dwyer for counseling.

With his eyes on Amanda's coming bonanza, Spartanburg, SC bad-boy Del Dangurs keeps close tabs on Amanda and the long hoped-for windfall.

Meanwhile, Matt Garrett, Amanda's uncle, leaves his CIA post and arrives in Afghanistan to recover Zachary's remains. But first he leads a daring vengeance raid into Pakistan that results in a clue to Zachary's fate. With hopeful evidence in hand, Matt continues the search for his brother as physical reminders of him are being destroyed or attacked back home, including Riley, who holds her own secrets close.

Author: A.J. Tata
First Release: 2011
ISBN: 978-1508403913
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Mortal Threat

Medical school student Amanda Garrett and American doctors working secretly in Africa have found a cure for the Ebola and Human Immunodeficiency Viruses.

Leaders of the Islamic State want the cure so they can show the world Islam is a benevolent religion that all Africans should follow.

The President of the United States believes an alleged 30,000-year-old Sub-Saharan religious text called The Book of Catalyst identifies him as being of divine origin.

As Amanda operates her portion of the clandestine CIA Project Nightingale in a Tanzanian orphanage, she is attacked and chased by brutal killers called The Leopard and The Cheetah. Amanda has 48 hours to escape across the Serengeti Plain before the remaining vials of the cure expire.

The Islamic State escalates attacks across the Middle East using freshly converted fighters from Africa. The American President, however, chooses not to deploy sufficient troops to save U.S. Special Forces, including Amanda's husband, assisting in the air war against ISIS.

As Amanda attempts to save the rapidly decomposing formula for the Ebola and HIV cures, she finds herself at the center of a clash between warring media titans, Jonathan Beckwith and Zhor al Rhazziq, who are following her every step toward the Olduvai Gorge, which some scientists claim to be the origin of human life.

Author: A.J. Tata
First Release: 2015
ISBN: 978-1508483786
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform