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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!
Balance of Evil
Balance of Evil by Kim Rozdeba is a globe-hopping political thriller about Scott Barton, a retired mining executive whose post-heart-attack drift is detonated when he finds a titanium USB on a beach in Cabo San Lucas. What begins as curiosity turns into a conspiracy involving a secret Cold War pact, FIST, that suggests world powers have long been choreographing conflict in the name of “balance.” Scott and his wife, Colleen, are pushed from Mexico to Canada, Israel, Europe, and beyond, pursued by intelligence forces, money networks, and the awful realization that history may be less accidental than advertised.
I found the book most alive when it fused geopolitical paranoia with the worn intimacy of Scott and Colleen’s marriage. The chase mechanics are brisk, but the emotional engine is quieter: two people who have become strangers inside the same life suddenly forced to rely on each other with almost feral urgency. Colleen, in particular, gives the story a welcome edge. She’s not merely the frightened spouse or convenient sidekick; she is damaged, observant, funny, irritating, and often sharper than Scott when survival demands it. Their relationship keeps the novel from becoming only a dossier with explosions.
The conspiracy itself is audacious, sometimes deliciously so. Rozdeba leans into big, barbed ideas: covert superpower cooperation, manufactured instability, shell companies, assassinations, intelligence tradecraft, and the moral rot of “peace” maintained by violence. The exposition can feel heavy, as if the novel wants to brief me as much as thrill me. But I was drawn in by the book’s momentum and its appetite for scale. It has that old-fashioned thriller confidence: airports, aliases, dead drops, cryptic files, and the sense that every polished hotel lobby may contain a predator.
I think the target audience is readers who enjoy political thrillers, conspiracy thrillers, espionage fiction, and historical secret-history novels. Fans of Dan Brown’s puzzle-box momentum or Robert Ludlum’s institutional paranoia will recognize the terrain, though Rozdeba gives it a more contemporary anxiety about disinformation, authoritarian drift, and hidden money. Balance of Evil is a restless, high-stakes debut that treats peace not as a condition but as a contested battlefield. A thriller for readers who like their conspiracies vast, their heroes bruised, and their secrets radioactive.
Pages: 376 | ASIN : B0GND3M1W7
