Novels

                                                  Invisible Shadows - The Truth Behind the Silence

Genre: International Thriller/Literary Fiction
Setting: Lima, Peru (Contemporary)
Status: Forthcoming

When British diplomat Simon Edward Sterling arrives in Lima on a two-year diplomatic assignment, he expects nothing more than another chapter in a career devoted to public service. Instead, an unexpected encounter with Patricia Isabel Llosa, a thoughtful and accomplished officer serving in an important Peruvian government institution, quietly transforms his life in ways neither could have imagined.

Against the timeless beauty of Peru, from the elegant streets of Miraflores and the historic Plaza de Armas to the windswept shores of Paracas, their friendship slowly deepens into a love founded not upon grand gestures, but upon trust, respect and shared values.

Then, without warning, the ordinary rhythm of their lives is shattered.

As an international investigation gathers momentum beyond the knowledge of those caught within its reach, duty collides with love, silence becomes more powerful than words, and appearances begin to conceal truths that no one is yet permitted to reveal.

At the centre of the unfolding mystery stands Colonel Alejandro Vargas, an honourable counterintelligence officer determined to protect his country, unaware that every step of his painstaking investigation is drawing three decent people towards a destiny none of them sought.

Invisible Shadows – The Truth Behind the Silence is a deeply moving literary novel of love, honour, sacrifice and integrity, reminding us that while justice may eventually uncover the truth, innocent lives are sometimes forever changed by the hidden consequences of organized crime.

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                                                            The Door to Hell – Lost on the Black Sands

Genre: Mystery/Adventure
Setting: The Karakum Desert, Turkmenistan (Contemporary)
Status: Forthcoming

When Bulgarian documentary filmmaker Damyan Petrov travels to Turkmenistan to film the final chapter of his ambitious series on the ancient Silk Road, he expects a journey through forgotten caravan routes, abandoned wells and the haunting ruins buried beneath the vast Karakum Desert.

Instead, the desert has something very different in store for him.

After a violent sandstorm destroys their route and strands the expedition deep within the Black Sands, Damyan becomes separated from his three Turkmen companions – Atageldi, Arslan, and Merdan. With their vehicle trapped in the sand, communications lost and water running dangerously low, he sets out alone to find them, following the faint traces of an ancient caravan route that the desert has been erasing for centuries.

What begins as a search for his missing friends soon takes a darker turn. An abandoned caravanserai, an ancient well, a mysterious compass and a cryptic marking lead Damyan towards a secret that others are already hunting. Sapar and his men are not explorers. They are smugglers, prepared to risk the brutal Karakum for antiquities that could command a fortune on the international black market.

As Damyan struggles against thirst, heat, exhaustion and the vastness of a desert where a wrong turn can mean death, he discovers that his three companions may still be alive, and that they know something the smugglers desperately want to uncover.

Beneath the Black Sands lies a secret preserved for centuries, connecting the forgotten caravans of the Silk Road with a lost chapter of Turkmenistan's extraordinary cultural heritage.

In a land where the desert can erase a human footprint within hours, history has survived for centuries beneath the sand.

And Damyan must reach it before the men who intend to steal it do.

The Door to Hell – Lost on the Black Sands is a tale of survival, friendship, mystery and pursuit, set against the haunting beauty and formidable power of the Karakum Desert -and a tribute to the people and ancient heritage of Turkmenistan.

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 Abu Nidal: The Revolutionary Who Became a Terrorist – The Man, the Terrorist and the Myth

In the bloodstained lobby of a Portuguese hotel in 1983, a Palestinian diplomat who believed in dialogue with Israel was gunned down at point-blank range. The gunman fled. Within hours, a statement appeared in Damascus claiming responsibility. The name attached to it would soon become synonymous with international terror: Abu Nidal.

But who was Abu Nidal?

Born Sabri Khalil al-Banna in the prosperous orange groves of Jaffa, he was a boy who lost everything in 1948. He grew up in refugee camps, joined the Ba'ath Party, entered Yasser Arafat's Fatah, and rose to become the movement's representative in Khartoum and Baghdad. He was trusted by Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), one of Arafat's closest lieutenants. He managed money, built commercial fronts, cultivated relationships with Arab governments and demonstrated an unusual talent for operating in the shadows.

Then, in 1974, he broke with Fatah.

Expelled, sentenced to death in absentia and accused of attempting to assassinate Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Sabri al-Banna did not disappear. Instead, he founded Fatah – The Revolutionary Council, an organization that would soon be known simply as the Abu Nidal Organization. From Baghdad, with the backing of Iraq's Ba'athist regime, he built a clandestine machine capable of assassinating Palestinian moderates, attacking airports, hijacking aircraft, seizing embassies and striking targets across Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

For two decades, Abu Nidal was the most dangerous terrorist of the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. Governments feared him. Intelligence agencies hunted him. The media amplified his name. Victims fell in Lisbon, Paris, London, Kuwait, Rome, Athens and beyond. His organization became notorious for its ruthlessness, its secrecy and its willingness to kill Palestinians as readily as Israelis or Westerners.

Yet as the legend grew, so did the questions.

Was Abu Nidal truly the mastermind behind every attack attributed to him? Or did states, intelligence services and the media themselves make him appear larger than he really was?

How much of the man the world called Abu Nidal was real, and how much of the legend had been created around him? Was he the architect of a vast international terrorist network, or a useful instrument wielded by governments that needed deniability? Did his organization possess the capabilities its reputation suggested, or did fear and mythology amplify every successful operation into something more formidable than the reality?

This documentary traces Abu Nidal's journey from the orange groves of Jaffa to the refugee camps of Gaza, from the corridors of Fatah to the safe houses of Baghdad, from the assassination of Issam Sartawi in a Portuguese hotel to the final years of a man who died under disputed circumstances in Baghdad in 2002. It examines his relationship with Yasser Arafat, his rivalry with the PLO leadership, his dependence on Iraqi patronage and his transformation into a figure whose name alone could generate headlines and panic.

Through eyewitness accounts, archival material, intelligence assessments and historical analysis, Abu Nidal: The Revolutionary Who Became a Terrorist asks the question that has haunted terrorism scholars, journalists and investigators for decades:

Was Abu Nidal indeed large, or was he made to look larger by his legend?

The answer reveals not only the story of one man, but the anatomy of international terror itself: how states use non-state actors, how mythology becomes a weapon, how fear can be manufactured and how a single name can become more powerful than the organization behind it.

This is not a story of heroes and villains. It is a story of ambition, betrayal, ideology, statecraft and the price of violence. It is a story about the Palestinian struggle, the Cold War's shadow conflicts, the rise of modern terrorism and the men who believed that history could be reversed through force.

Abu Nidal: The Revolutionary Who Became a Terrorist – The Man, the Terrorist and the Myth is a documentary for anyone who wants to understand not just who Abu Nidal was, but how the world made him into what he became.

Invest your time. Invest your resources. Because the legend of Abu Nidal is not just a story about one terrorist. It is a story about how terror works.

                                                                             The Dragon's Blind Spot

A vanished ship. A forgotten Cold War programme. A secret written across an entire continent.

When the research vessel Hai Long disappears in the South China Sea, what looks at first like a maritime accident uncovers something far larger: Project Lotus, a multinational scientific programme buried for four decades beneath official denial and vanished archives.

Drawn together across three continents, German researcher Adrian Keller, Chinese geologist Mei Zhang, and Singaporean analyst Tan Wei Ming begin piecing together a story reaching back to 1979, when Chinese scientist Chen Guo, Soviet geophysicist Viktor Sokolov, and British researcher Edward Mercer set out to study a set of geological anomalies no one could explain; and found something that would outlive them all.

Their discovery was extraordinary. Their mistake was believing it could stay a secret.

As the investigation spreads from the jungles of Cambodia to the ports of Singapore, from the mountains of Ladakh to the boardrooms of Europe, old loyalties fracture and new dangers surface. At the centre of it stands Étienne Moreau, an ageing Frenchman who has spent forty years protecting, and concealing, a truth that reaches beyond the interests of any one nation, and a family that has waited two generations to inherit it: whatever the cost.

As governments, scientists, and shadow interests converge on a single archive, the investigators uncover not just the reach of Project Lotus, but the blind spot at its very centre: the one place nobody, in forty-five years, ever thought to look.

From the South China Sea to the high frontier of the Himalayas, The Dragon's Blind Spot is an international thriller of science, secrecy, and inheritance, in the tradition of Frederick Forsyth and Tom Clancy, and a reminder that the most dangerous secrets are the ones hiding in plain sight.

                                                                                    Nowhere to Belong

A riveting, true-life geopolitical thriller about a man who chose conscience over country and paid for it twice.

In October 2022, Russian soldier Artyom Vovchenko walked away from his unit rather than fight in a war he believed to be unjust. It was the first of many border-crossings in a fight that would consume the next three years of his life.

What followed was an odyssey through legal dark zones on three continents: hiding in Georgia, rebuilding a life in Indonesia, then risking everything on a plea for asylum in the United States, only to be met not with sanctuary but with detention. Betrayed by a system meant to protect him, Artyom spent over a year behind bars before being deported through Cairo and handed straight to Russian Military Police the moment he landed in Moscow.

For most men in his position, that would have been the end of the story. It was not the end of his.

Confined under guard while recovering from a back injury sustained in US detention, Artyom watched, waited and planned; and when a routine hospital visit offered a single narrow window, he took it. Fuelled by his late mother's final words to him, "Live your life, don't be afraid of anything, do what you want," he slipped out of a Moscow clinic and vanished into the city, eventually crossing the border into Belarus and disappearing beyond the reach of the state that had already caught him once.

Nowhere to Belong is a harrowing, deeply human story of survival, uncertainty, and the unyielding fight for personal agency in a world ruled by borders.

Vanguard Reed

Beyond Borders. Beyond the Headlines.

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