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Nimble, Restless Intellects
World of Worlds follows young travelers, reporters, climbers, drifters, and idealists across continents and political upheaval as adventure becomes a reckoning with danger, history, and the self. What drew you to the period between 1968 and 1981 as the backdrop for these stories?
WORLD OF WORLDS is a collection of action and adventure stories during a time of transition, upheaval, exploration, and self-discovery. These tales are the product of culture shock. Or more precisely, reverse culture shock. Whatever it was by the mid-1970s, my life on the road at an end but not quite willing to give it up, I decided to try my hand at literature by recreating in fictional form the characters, complexities, landscapes, situations, tastes, smells, psychologies, dramas, insights, pleasures, and terrors I had seen in the worlds I had traveled. The main time focus is from 1968, that hinge year, to 1974. That was the moment of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam War, when Apartheid firmly gripped South Africa and wars of national liberation swirled around it, and African dictatorships sprouted like poisonous weeds, and political killing became the norm.
Many of the characters are young, restless, and morally tested. What interested you about writing people at that stage of life?
Only young people should contemplate making the journeys described in the stories. The characters – overwhelmingly young – are Americans, mostly, but there also are Australians, Brits, and Africans. An alienated, energetic, and rebellious bunch, they have been on the move for months on end. They often are challenged by the situations they encounter. That is due partly to their limited experience and judgment. Also, they are alone in foreign spaces, where everything is new and strange. To overcome their problems and to succeed, they need courage, quick thinking, energy, curiosity, and empathy in much higher doses than if they had simply stayed at home. The characters create their own predicaments and manage their own escapes. Or sometimes not.
The stories balance adventure with reflection and consequence. How did you approach that balance?
The characters in WORLD OF WORLDS have nimble, restless intellects. They think a lot. But they face fearful stress often of their own making: an engagement going up in smoke; an illusory friendship unmasked; ideals nearly betrayed; a journalist chasing a perilous story; a conniving financial fugitive near broke in central Africa; an Englishman begging in India; a hitchhiker surrounded by violent hatred in South Africa; an overworked reporter about to burn his bridges; a mountain climber escaping from himself; two travelers in a leaky canoe on the Congo River. Consequence and responsibility come from personal choice; they can be frighteningly unpredictable.
What do you hope readers take away from the collection’s encounters with political unrest, culture shock, and personal ambition?
It’s usually a good idea to be aware of what the locals are thinking when one is abroad. It can save you a lot of trouble. The triad of political unrest, culture shock, and personal ambition were constants among travelers in underdeveloped parts of the world in the 1960s and 1970s, though. They were particularly prominent in Africa amid the instability and aftershocks that followed the end of colonialism. Is that moment behind us? The characters make unlikely role models. As one reviewer of WORLD OF WORLDS remarked, “What lingers most powerfully is the remarkable fortitude of these central characters. Seen from a contemporary perspective, they feel almost otherworldly—resilient figures thrust into remote corners of the globe, often facing misfortune or profound uncertainty. One cannot help but wonder if, placed in similar predicaments today, would modern travelers possess the same grit and resourcefulness?”
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The characters, Americans mostly-tough, rebellious youth, far from home, on bad roads, usually broke-test cultural and racial limits in strange, alluring, but pitiless surroundings, exposed to relentless existential and physical pressures that threaten their moral underpinnings and their very survival.
WORLD OF WORLDS readers prize Vietnam-era historical fiction, post-colonial Africa travel stories, character-driven 1970s political thrillers, coming-of-age adventure. They want moral seriousness alongside the action. Anyone who has traveled the world’s back roads-foreigners abroad, children of expats, tourists, students of post-independence Africa, Africans, Europeans, Americans, Australians-will recognize the authenticity immediately.
The author is an accomplished novelist, journalist, and diplomat. But above all, he was there.
The Cuckoo Asset
The Cuckoo Asset is an ambitious spy thriller that moves between Belfast, Coventry, Luanda, Kinshasa, London, Zambia, and Langley without losing sight of its central question: what happens when a clever young man is pulled into a game he doesn’t understand until it’s far too late. David “Kenny” McKenna starts as a bruised, gifted electronics student from Belfast, someone who trusts circuits more than people. That makes him useful to men like Peter DeVries and the nameless Chief, who see intelligence, loneliness, and technical talent as tools to be picked up and used.
I think the book works best as a story about recruitment, manipulation, and consequence. Its Cold War world is full of taxis, hotel rooms, dead drops, oil installations, chess games, fake reports, and people who know just enough to be dangerous. Angola gives the novel its political weight, while McKenna gives it its emotional centre. Judith Morales and Joe Chilondo are especially interesting because they aren’t written as simple side players. They’re compromised, capable, and human, and their decisions keep pushing the story into murkier territory.
Mac Seáin’s style is patient and procedural, often building tension through logistics rather than spectacle. The details of travel papers, surveillance habits, smuggling routes, electronics, and chess strategy give the novel a grounded feel. There’s also a recurring chess metaphor that feels earned because McKenna’s whole life becomes a board controlled by stronger players. The final message in The Urusov Gambit, “A king can whisper, but a pawn stays silent still,” neatly captures the book’s sense of power, secrecy, and survival.
What I liked most is that the novel treats history as something lived through by frightened, practical people. The assassination plot, the oil sabotage, the shifting loyalties, and the later 1999 reckoning all connect back to personal choices made under pressure. The book has plenty of action, especially near the end, but it’s not just chasing thrills. It’s interested in how states hide crimes, how assets become liabilities, and how ordinary people carry the damage long after the operation is over.
By the end, The Cuckoo Asset feels like a historical espionage novel with the heart of a survivor’s story. It’s about Angola and Cold War interference, yes, but it’s also about Kenny McKenna learning that cleverness doesn’t protect you from being used. The closing line, “The game would never be over,” works because the novel has spent hundreds of pages showing exactly why that’s true. It’s a layered, serious, and quietly unsettling thriller that rewards readers who enjoy espionage built on character, tradecraft, and long consequences.
Pages: 349 | ASIN : B0GHPC8YHW
Lifelong Traveler
Balance of Evil follows a retired mining executive who happens upon a titanium USB on a Cabo beach and finds himself involved in a conspiracy involving a secret Cold War pact. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
I’m a walker. On vacation, I walk every day, preferably on a beach. Years ago, on one of those walks, I started asking myself, What if? What would it take to upend an ordinary man’s life with a single object in the sand? That question kept building, walk after walk, until I had a book.
Scott Barton is not a typical action hero; he’s older, reflective, and recovering from a major health scare. Why did you choose to center the story on a protagonist at this stage of life?
Thrillers usually hand the world to people in their thirties, but I wanted someone with more depth, confidence, and means, which meant someone older. Scott is close to my age, so I knew the ins and outs of his head. I wanted a person with a history, a heart that had betrayed him, and enough energy and wit to fight back.
The novel moves across multiple countries and political landscapes. How did you research and construct such a global setting while keeping the narrative cohesive?
I’m a lifelong traveler. At eighteen, I spent a year crossing Europe and reached as far as Turkey, and I’ve been traveling ever since. I’ve stood in most of the places in this book. The rest I researched the way I travel: through blogs, local writers, food, and history. Skip the guidebooks. They never tell you what a city actually feels like at three in the afternoon.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I just finished my third nonfiction book on branding, and I’m well into the sequel to Balance of Evil, called LIES. The first book ended with the conspiracy only half-uncovered and several characters still unaccounted for. LIES picks up there. The pact didn’t end at Camp David in 1959—and it isn’t ending now, either.
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Driven by shocking discoveries that challenge his resolve and health, Scott teams up with his estranged daughter and a brilliant rogue hacker. Together, they work to expose the terrifying depths of a shadowy operation manipulating world events. As their mission intensifies, Scott faces devastating betrayals, unimaginable sacrifices, and deadly forces far greater than he ever imagined.
Balance of Evil delivers a fast-paced, thought-provoking political thriller packed with high-stakes action, chilling conspiracy, and brutal moral conflict. Fans of Baldacci, Ludlum, or Flynn will love this gripping tale of resilience, justice, and the fight against corruption.
Can one man tip the scales against a powerful shadow government? Or has evil already won?
Don’t wait—grab your copy today and immerse yourself in this edge-of-your-seat thriller!
Kindness and Humanity
Killing Einstein follows an FBI agent assigned to surveil Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel during World War II, only to be pulled into their friendship, ideas, and a deadly web of espionage, loyalties, and danger. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I was a math nerd in a former life, and I’ve always been fascinated by Gödel’s incompleteness results. I’ve also always been fascinated by the fact that Einstein and Gödel walked together for so many years, and no one really knows what they talked about. So I thought I’d mix those two fascinations into a spy story.
How did you balance the demands of espionage plotting with the novel’s philosophical and mathematical ideas?
Great question. I am what they call in the fiction world a “pantser,” meaning I do not outline, I do not know who the characters will be, and I do not know how the story will proceed. I just get a core idea and start writing from the seat of my pants. That made balancing the spy story and the metaphysical ideas especially hard for me, and I ultimately found the balance during the long editing process. The original versions had a lot more math and were much less page-turning!
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
As a pantser, the themes bubbled up through the writing process rather than being planned in advance. Once everything settled, the themes I saw included Gödel’s insight that there are true things that cannot be proved true, but also the difference between right and wrong, and the difficulties all of us face when we confront that difference. The book also became about how some things are not what they seem, while the most important things are often exactly as they seem.
What did you most want to capture about the friendship between Einstein and Gödel?
Their energy, their love for one another, their kindness and humanity, and their shared devotion to the idea that there are deep truths—including moral truths—that are real and not relative. That may seem strange coming from the father of relativity, but Einstein’s theory is actually built on a remarkable invariant truth: the speed of light never changes, regardless of one’s frame of reference. Morally, against the backdrop of Nazism’s profound evil, neither man lost confidence in the reality of good and evil, though each remained sensitive to the challenges we all sometimes face in choosing between the two.
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The Nalanda Manuscript
The Nalanda Manuscript is a globe-trotting thriller that opens with fire, ash, and heartbreak in ancient Nalanda before dropping readers straight into modern-day mountain roads, secret missions, and a hunt for a manuscript that shouldn’t exist. In simple terms, the story follows Izak Kaurben, a former special forces officer who gets pulled into a high-stakes quest to recover a long-lost Nalanda manuscript that mysteriously surfaced in Mali. What starts as a historical curiosity becomes a dangerous cross-continental chase, blending real history with tense action and emotional undercurrents. It’s fast, cinematic, and surprisingly reflective underneath all the movement.
The writing moves with a restless energy. Chapters slide quickly from quiet conversations over tea to gunfire in the desert. I liked how grounded some moments felt, especially the scenes in Himachal Pradesh where Izak reconnects with people who know him beyond the soldier he used to be. The book makes space for these pauses, and they kept me invested because they showed why Izak says yes to things he could easily walk away from. Not every choice the author makes is subtle, but that’s part of the charm. The story wants to entertain first, teach you something second, and only then make you sit with the weight of its ideas.
I also found myself thinking about how much the book respects history while still letting itself play. The sections about Nalanda’s library and Timbuktu’s manuscripts felt lovingly researched, and they made me care about the artifact at the center of all this. There’s a clear admiration for the people who protect cultural heritage, the kind of admiration that gives the plot extra heat. The explanations sometimes leaned toward compact info-bursts, but they were interesting enough that I didn’t mind. The mix of action and scholarship shouldn’t work as well as it does, yet somehow it clicks.
I’d say this book is perfect for readers who love adventure thrillers with a historical core, the kind who appreciate both chase scenes and quiet human moments. If you enjoy stories that move quickly but still want to feel something real beneath the momentum, this one will land well. And if you’ve got a soft spot for lost knowledge, ancient libraries, or the idea that one manuscript can hold a world together, you’ll enjoy it even more.
Pages: 309 | ASIN : B0G3C2BK79
An Inevitable Choice
The Romanov Legacy II: Ahead of the Storm follows two Romanov children in the final days of Imperial Russia, who, with the help of loyalists in the White Army, travel to safety in London. What was your inspiration for the wild journey you take readers on in this novel?
As the story continues from the first book in the series, the children are entrusted to the protection of Captain Tupolev and his special company of men for the secret escape from Yekaterinburg east to freedom. He leads them and his attachment along the Trans-Siberian railway as part of the retreat of the White Army toward Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. The actual historical flight of the White Army and their Czech allies is one of the great human feats of the last portion of the Russian civil war. The escape of the children as part of this historic event was an inevitable choice.
Each of the main characters in your novel faces unique challenges and brings different perspectives to the situation. What character did you enjoy writing for? Was there one that was more challenging to write for?
Maxim Petrov was one of my favorite characters because he had to lead the transition of the nation and family from their protected life within Imperial Russia through the revolution and beyond while maintaining his secret life as both a spymaster but as the master of the great plan to free the family from danger and deliver the Tzar’s legacy against all odds. He had to be a master of all roles.
Alexei was difficult to develop because he had to transition from a bright child into a man so quickly under duress. Keeping his role believable and yet having him become a warrior and future leader was challenging.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
I wanted to define the conditions that actually existed at the time historically. There were many people struggling to survive during this period. Survival was a necessity, and that tested many people’s courage and loyalty under the worst of situations.
What readers can expect in the third book of the series, and when it will be available?
Readers can expect to see an exciting and satisfying conclusion that leaves them with hope for the future and a feeling of continuity of the story. The third book is written and will be out early to mid-next year.
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Maxim Petrov takes on the role of the White Hand, head of a league of royalist spies, to undermine the new government and clear the way for the children to escape Russia. He also carries out his promise to preserve the tsar’s legacy by preserving the wealth of the empire. He relocates to London to lead the shadow government there.
During the many months of escape across Siberia, Alexei, the heir to the throne, and his adoring sister Anastasia, grow into young adults who can take on the challenges of this chaotic life and gain survival skills they will need for the new empire. Yekaterinburg, Omsk, Irkutsk, Vladivostok, and finally safety for a time overseas.
Will the entourage reach the safety of a new incognito life in London? Will the dreaded Cheka assassins find them again? Will the Romanov legacy be preserved for the Russian people? This is a continuation of the exciting tale of a family thrown from power and desperate to survive to fight another day.
Unexpected Psychologies
Drinking from the Stream follows two young men on the run for different reasons who cross paths and set out together exploring East Africa and their own morals in a world where dictatorship and mass murders are the norm. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I left the US to travel one week after graduating college. When I came back five years later, my mother kept asking me, “What did you really do in Africa?” How to explain what I was thinking, whom I had met, where I had gone, what I had seen and felt and heard, smelled and tasted, what I had learned, what scared me, what made me laugh, and what inspired me? I decided to write a novel, a kind of anthem for the generation that came out of the wreckage of the ’sixties and whom I met on the road. I thought the story I wanted to tell would have more weight if the character who kills his antisemitic persecutor was not actually Jewish, thus forcing him into unexpected psychologies. Having two narrators allowed me to broaden the scope and to develop the characters in many more settings and situations than would otherwise be possible, and through their eyes also to show more of Africa and of the world.
You took your time developing the characters and the story, which had a great emotional impact. How did you manage the pacing of the story while keeping readers engaged?
There are novelist tricks that I had to learn. A novel consists of scenes. Something must happen, or else there’s no reason for the scene to be there. Scenes should ”start late and end early,” not waste time, and leave the reader wanting to know what comes next. I alluded to massacres at the start of the book, which I hoped would give readers a feel for what came next. There is a rhythm to travel which speeds up and slows down, and the action of the book also speeds up and slows down.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
A partial list: friendship, long-distance travel on bad roads with little money, politics and history, courage, the world of the early 1970s, East Africa and Ethiopia, judgment, colonialism, revolution, mass murder, dictatorship, insurrection, racism, loyalty, small acts of bravery.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
Next book: A TRIP BY CANOE (short stories) to be published by Koehler Books July 2026.
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Jake Ries, a twenty-two-year-old Nebraska farm boy turned oil roughneck, turns fugitive when he unintentionally kills a homicidal White supremacist on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. On the run, he meets Karl Appel, a restless Oxford dropout and former anti-war activist struggling with his own personal demons. Together they throw caution to the wind and plunge into the Ethiopian and East African hinterland, where they discover that dictatorship and mass murder are facts of life.
Love, Hate, and Ego
The Long Farewell follows a young man with an Oedipus complex living in the rise of Nazi Germany who, after a series of tragic events, seeks to get revenge on his father. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
When I was in college, I was fascinated by Jorgen, a fellow student whom others in our student house labeled as a weirdo. He exhibited abrupt mood swings and had an aggressive aura, although he was skinny and short. When something irked Jorgen – and many things did – he stood trembling, his fists clenched, his eyes wide-open, in front of you and then burst into tears. After such an emotional eruption, he was withdrawn and silent. In our student house, we placed bets on how long he would last at university. I had been so stupid to tell the others I wanted to become a writer and that Jorgen could become a fascinating character in the novel I wanted to write. The rumor had apparently reached Jorgen: during an evening out at the well-known student pub The Red Scaffold, he confronted me about my statement. It turned out that, for once, he wasn’t aggressive. On the contrary, he seemed flattered. We found a quiet place on the terrace. Jorgen told me he wanted to become a poet and asked a string of questions. We drank a few beers, and he became nostalgic and tearful. He boasted he was diagnosed as borderline schizophrenic. He really seemed proud about it and became strangely souped-up and said with trembling lips and flared nostrils: “My mother turned me into a creep. I was only thirteen when she confessed that she wanted me to make love to her. I remember that a fiery arrow went along my spine, making me shudder.” He peered closely at my shocked face and almost whispered:” Nobody knows if we did it or not.”
What could I say? I was quiet.
Jorgen looked me straight in the eyes. I saw he was fighting back tears. “I hate my father,” he whined softly, exhaling with quivering lips. “It’s all his fault.”
That evening, in my bed, I vowed to write a book one day, circling a character with an Oedipus complex.
And to dodge Jorgen.
I didn’t have to do that long. Two weeks later, Jorgen didn’t check in on Monday at our student house.
And never came back.
The memory of this troubled young man stayed with me for several years.
And popped up stronger than ever when I began writing “The Long Farewell.”
The tragic boy Hermann was born.
What are some things that you find interesting about the human condition that you think make for great fiction?
The contradiction between our ‘good’ and ‘bad’ urges is breathtaking. The building of our personalities after birth is chaotic. Our instincts are relentlessly brutal. If babies had the strength to wield weapons, I believe that most of them would be murderers before their third year. We speak with disdain –and fear- about narcissists and don’t want to face up to the fact that our own ego is narcissistic on different levels. In “The Long Farewell,” we see Hermann’s mental suffering, fueled by his hate for his SS father, getting worse and culminating in a dangerous schizophrenia, leading to a truly apocalyptic ending in the German city of Dresden. Schizophrenia is a fascinating and eerie mental disease. When a baby grows up in a family where its mother and father imprint it with radically opposed worldviews, research has detected that the tension thus generated later on in life is the ideal breeding ground for mental anomalies. In past times, these anomalies were called demons. You may smile, but I assure you that we have to take them seriously.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
You know, I often think that everything on this Earth eventually comes down to the endless configurations that love, hate, and ego can produce. Love and ego can join forces to form powerful hate and cruelty. I know that we want to see love as something pristine and holy, but reality shows us otherwise.
Of course, I propose my statement here, pure and well-defined. In everyday life, the borders between love and hate –and ego! – are fuzzy. In my oeuvre, I try to follow the intricate signs in our mind that forecast violent drama. Not an easy task, I can assure you. You may wonder why I am so frantically searching for the roots of our violence. I wonder about that too, because after 39 years of being a full-time author, I’m still searching. I’ve been a travel writer in conflict zones between 1990 and 2003, visiting Somalia, Liberia, Sudan, Lebanon, Burundi, Bosnia, Gaza, Iran, Iraq, Kosovo, Myanmar… to name but a few. Those travels have surely influenced my outlook on the world. In Belgium and the Netherlands, my Flemish/Dutch publisher published 45 books. Although set on several continents, they all focus on the mystery of our aggression, on the executioners and the executed.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I suspect that I’m writing my last novel: I am seventy-two, and I feel my energy waning. Three years ago, I fell victim to a sepsis infection that nearly killed me. I still struggle with the damage the sepsis has wrecked. Moreover, I am afraid to lose my mental powers and glide into Alzheimer’s maw. The terrible disease destroyed my mother’s brain. I know that Alzheimer’s is hereditary, therefore I spy on myself as if my life depends on it. Which it does, of course.
But enough whining, my manuscript-in-progress carries the ominous working title “Black Water,” but I keep searching for a better one. Over here, in Belgium, readers know me as an author who writes crossovers between suspense and literary, but “Black Water” is more magical realism, with a story taking place on different continents, with a central character, a writer/father hiding many secrets from his teenage daughter until a car accident results in a deep coma. Moran, the daughter, tries to wake him up by reading excerpts of his diary. I could explain more, but an author must be cautious and not divulge too much about a work in progress—the novel centers on love, sorrow, and guilt.
And magical mystery?
Maybe.
When out?
I hope next year.
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His father is in the SS, his mother is Belarusian, and his girlfriend is Jewish. After a brutal clash with his father, Hermann and his mother flee to Paris. Swept along by a maelstrom of events, Hermann ends up as a spy for the British in the Polish extermination camp Treblinka.
The trauma of what he sees in this realm of death intensifies his pessimistic outlook on humanity. In Switzerland, the famous psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung tries to free Hermann of his frightening schizophrenia, but fails to unravel the power of the young man’s emotions, especially his intense hate for his father.
What follows is a tragic chain of events, leading to Hermann’s ultimate revenge on his father: the apocalyptic bombing of Dresden.
THE LONG FAREWELL is an unforgettable exploration of fascism’s lure and the roots of the Holocaust. More than ever, the novel is a mirror for our modern times.
