Literary Las Vegas: Rob Turney

President Grant Richfield is scheduled to ring in the new year and kick off his re-election in Las Vegas. News of the president's planned televised celebration sets into motion a plan made by a cell of U.S. jihadists (including a long-established mole planted in the FBI) to mount an attack to rival Sept. 11.

All that stands in the way of assassination and New Year's bedlam on the Strip is a Las Vegas FBI agent who convinces a young mixed martial arts fighter to go undercover.

Weaving historical fact with fiction, Rob Turney spins "Home Grown: Terror Strikes from Within" into a 640-page novel. Turney, a Henderson resident who was born and raised in Las Vegas, started out writing ad copy and commercials. He also pursued acting, broadcasting and real estate before turning to fiction.

For more on the book, visit homegrownterrorstrikesfromwithin.com.

Excerpt from 'Home Grown: Terror Strikes from Within'

The Las Vegas FBI office had been a fairly quiet post since the days of the Mob, but all that changed on a fateful September morning when two jumbo jets tore into the World Trade Center. Not just because Las Vegas would make an inviting target to a group of people that despised everything it stood for, but because it was discovered that the terrorists had spent quite a bit of time in "Sin City" prior to the attack. The entire country watched grainy black and white images on hotel surveillance videos, of ordinary looking men walking with jerky movements through casinos. What most people didn't know was that prior to the attack, a Las Vegas room service attendant had made a hasty call to the FBI expressing her concerns over a conversation she'd overheard. Her heavy Somali accent probably didn't do too much to convince Zane Josephs, the young agent handing her call, that she was serious or credible. He recorded the call, as was the standing order of the day for all potential bomb threats, and gave his obligatory, "We'll look into it ma'am."