New: The Sleeper List
It all begins with an idea.
April 2022
During the covid-19 pandemic, I finished a new novel, "The Sleeper List." 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 just beginning a novel about a guy who wins the lottery and decides to give all the money away to good causes. I a calling it “Jackpot.”
”The Sleeper List,” which came out in April of 2022, is available at amazon.com and is being nicely reviewed by Kirkus and others.