New: The Man Who Fell in Love With His Wife

September 024

I published a new spy novel, The Mn Who Fell in Love With His Wife, in August. It’s getting great reviews. Prairie Authors Reviews said it was “Deeply intriguing and addictively readable…” and called it “a page turner.”

This is how the story starts:
    "A week after I got word that my wife had died in a fiery collision with a gasoline truck, I found her phony passports, a 9-mm Sig Sauer, a magazine of heavy-duty ammunition for some other weapon, banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills, a thumb drive embossed with a line drawing of a naked woman, an old brass key with a number etched on it, and a King James Bible bookmarked with a folded sheet of paper full of numbers."
  And from there the man character, a retired New York fire fighter, goes on a frenzied journey to figure out who the heck he had actually married -- and whether her secret life was one done for good or evil. At best, he wonders if his wife had worked for the CIA but had not trusted him enough to tell him. At worst, he fears she worked for the Russians as a sleeper agent. In whatever tole she had, he also suspects that her death may not have been an accident.

Click here to get your copy from Amazon!

Previously: The Sleeper List: a spy novel

My last novel, The Sleeper List, was judged the best espionage thriller of 2022 by Readers Favorite. See the front page of my website for details and a video.

As the title suggests, “The Sleeper List” is about that rare group of spies who adopt false identities to avoid getting caught. They live what seem to be normal lives to hide their real identities — until activated. Most people became familiar with sleepers because of the hit Cold War TV series “The Americans.” It involved two Soviets who were ostensibly an American suburban couple when they weren’t scooping up military intelligence or assassinating people.

The classic sleeper was the Korean War hero in Richard Condon’s “The Manchurian Candidate.” His mission was to help North Korea elect its own candidate as president of the United States. Other novels that have sleepers as key characters include Nelson DeMille’s best seller “The Charm School” about a facility that trained Russians to pass themselves off as Americans and Stella Remington’s “The Moscow Sleepers,” a 2019 book about a network of Russian sleepers planted around the world.

The twist in the plot of “The Sleeper List” is that its main character, a lawyer who works for a supercomputer company, doesn’t want to be a spy. Not having been activated before the Berlin Wall falls and the Cold War effectively ends, he just wants to be left alone to deal with a sick son as his original mission seems irrelevant. His handlers, seeing a post-wCold War mission for him, have different ideas — as does the FBI when agents learn his real identity. The story of “The Sleeper List” is his struggle to outwit both sides to become free.

I know a lot about this world. As a journalist for 40 years, I covered the CIA, reported from Russia, was a NATO correspondent and wrote about Soviet espionage that used Mexico as a base to spy on the U.S.  My previous novels have dealt with Soviet cyber-espionage, including “The Hacker Chronicles” and “The Obituary Writer.” My second novel “The German Club” is a spy story set as the Berlin Wall comes down, an event I covered while stationed in Europe.

Down the road I am working on an AI thriller.
”The Sleeper List,” which came out in April of 2022, is available at amazon.com and was nicely reviewed by Kirkus and others.