I’m happy to report that I have a new book coming out this Autumn. Red Lies is a spy thriller mostly set in 1986 Sweden.
The book will be available on Amazon September 5, 2020. As always you’ll have a choice of eBook or Paperback. And of course, signed copies on my website store.
The backbone of this story has been at the back of my mind for many years now, but I’d never had the time to sit down and write it. I finally got around to doing that, this spring, when Covid19 surprisingly hit us and I stopped having to go to my day job for two months (I worked from home, and only 50%). I thought: ‘bonus free time’ — let’s get this story out.
So I fished out the ideas swimming at the back of my head and got to work. I knew I wanted to do a spy story set in the eighties, with Cold War shenanigans in the background. For the longest of times, the action was going to be set in England, but I recently discovered Sweden and fell in love with that gorgeous Scandinavian country (long story short, one of my cousin moved there a few years back, and I went to visit her a couple of times).
Lucky me, I discovered as I plotted the story along that that was a great move because Sweden played a major part in the events that followed Chernobyl (you’ll have to read the book to find out why).
As for 1986? Well, this too wasn’t a random decision. I simply chose it, because I was born in 1986.
When I recalled that it was also the year of the Chernobyl explosion, I figured it would be interesting to see what effect it had on the Russian spying program and this had a great influence on the direction the story took.
Incidentally, I was born a handful of days after the explosion, and my mum told me several stories about what it was like to have to care for a baby, in Switzerland, at that time. Her doctor had advised her to keep vegetables off the menu, and also to ban all dairy products (including milk). Unfortunately, she didn’t have enough breastmilk to feed me, so my dad went on a crusade to find me powder milk, but most drugstores were out of stock.
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If you want to make sure not to miss the deadline, you can already pre-order the eBook version and it will be delivered to you first thing on Sept. 5.