I’ve always been a voracious reader. Eventually, I began to be curious about how stories were actually put together. And then, of course, I began to try to write stories of my own.

Write what you know, they all said. Well, okay – what I knew most about was some of the places I’d lived over the years, places where, in the words of the French anthropologist Georges Condominas, the exotic slowly becomes the everyday. The places were unusual, to be sure, but even more unusual were some of people who moved in and out of these places.

I decided to see if I could set some of this down in story form. In a way, fiction writing can be a form of sympathetic magic – the author creates characters, gives them strengths, weaknesses and quirks, and then winds them up and plunks them down in a peculiar environment.

And then you watch what they do.

MURDER MOUNTAIN is a stand-alone thriller set in the mountainous border between Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.

Hiding away in a remote corner of Papua New Guinea, odd jobbing as a photographer and trek guide, ex-mountaineer Peter Blake stays under the radar. A wise move, given he’s wanted by the FBI.

But when Sanford’s crew finds him in Port Moresby, Peter’s luck begins to wane. They know about his dodgy past as an environmental activist and have found a way to use it.

They make him an offer: help them recover a downed satellite up high in the remote Star Mountains on the Indonesian border, and they’ll let him go on living under the radar.

It sounded simple enough, but Blake might have thought twice if he'd understood how valuable the satellite’s nosecone really was. If he knew that Sanford’s crew weren’t the only ones looking for it. And if he had realized that all of the other players were ready to sacrifice him‑‑and each other‑‑to get what they wanted.

I also write an action-adventure series, also published by The Book Folks, featuring Max Donovan, an ex-pilot who freelances as a “supplier” of almost anything that isn’t too illegal. The first Donovan book, One Beats the Bush, is set in Papua New Guinea and involves bird of paradise smugglers. The second, With Tooth and Nail, has Max in West Africa, chasing (and being chased by) a serial killer. You can look for them on Amazon, Goodreads, or the Book Bub. More Max Donovans are coming..

ONE BEATS THE BUSH deals with a ring of rare bird smugglers.

Meet Max Donovan, a man who was kicking butt when Jack Reacher was still in diapers. He’s an ex-Vietnam pilot with a smart mouth and brains to match. He makes his living supplying just about anything – as long as it’s not too illegal.

Max was in Bangkok when the call came that Fat Freddie was in a San Francisco jail on a homicide charge. Max and Freddie had done hard time years before in Long Dinh prison camp, and now Freddie was being framed for murder.

Max was not about to let that happen. The search for the real killer leads Max from San Francisco’s underbelly to the jungles of New Guinea – and into a web of intrigue, deception, and murder.

ONE BEATS THE BUSH is the first in a series of novels featuring adventurer Max Donovan.

WITH TOOTH AND NAIL, the second in the Donovan series, follows Max into the West African bush on the trail of a hitman.

A ruthless human predator was moving through the towns and villages of Senegal, picking off his victims one by one, working to a mysterious and very deadly pattern.

Deep in the bush, the wet season was descending like a giant cloak, blocking off the outside world and its paved roads, its government of laws, its safe, mundane certainties. 

Max Donovan enters this world, on the hunt for the killer.  The trail leads him across the country, from the back-streets of Dakar to the near-deserted border regions of the eastern province.

But suddenly, in the remote wilds of the Niokolo-Koba game park, Max discovers he's next.

THE SERPENT’S LAIR, the third in the series, is set in Sri Lanka, and involves the theft of a religious relic.

Max was minding his own business until a bomb in his hotel landed him in the hospital, it also threw him into a life-or-death struggle for control of the island’s lucrative heroin trade.

He’s quickly drawn into a web of intrigue involving a book manuscript, a shadowy drug lord and his band of hired assassins, a stolen religious relic, and a renegade group of jungle insurgents.

The action moves quickly, from the back alleys of Colombo’s underworld to the deceptively peaceful atolls of the Maldive Islands, and back again to the top of Sri Lanka’s holiest peak.

There, deep inside the mountain temple, Max races against time, the killers, and a ten-foot cobra, in a desperate attempt to prevent a tragedy of national proportions.

It’s out now on Amazon, in Kindle, paperback and hardback formats.

Find it at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNWKBH31

If you liked the first two in the series, I think you’ll like this one, too.

I’m currently at work on two other standalone novels. Today the Forest Will Burn is a tale of espionage and counter-insurgency in West Africa. And Crocodile Games is the story of four unlikely adventurers who flee the Leningrad Sate Circus to search for buried treasure off the Gambia coast.

No, the novels aren’t finished yet. But I do like to fool around with covers for the stuff I’m writing, which is what you see here.