"The Son Thief," my new crime thriller: another climate change anxiety baby.
My second novel in nine months was written, as was the last one, in the shadow of political and environmental fear.
You may remember that last fall I had a book come out. In Deadly Mirrors, available on Amazon Kindle and in paperback, was an international crime thriller involving a murder, a heist, and a dangerous sociopathic con artist called Marcus. My follow-up book to this one, The Son Thief, will be coming out soon, sometime in the early summer. It’s entering the final stages of production, and I hope that if you have some interest in my work, you might check it out. (There’s not a preorder link yet; I’ll post that as soon as I have one). The early reads of the book-in-progress have come back very positive and I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. You do not need to have read the first book to enjoy and understand the second one.
Although The Son Thief does not mention climate change, war, politics or history—the main preoccupations of this blog—it is much more closely related to what I write about here than you might think. On the eve of In Deadly Mirrors’s release in late October, I wrote this article about why I wrote the book. It was an escape, mainly, from my mounting anxiety and angst about increasing climate change disasters and how close to the brink of authoritarianism we in the United States were in 2021 (and still are). I did get a surprising amount of mental peace from writing the book, and the process of writing The Son Thief has been similar. Thus, it’s another climate change anxiety baby. Putting together a thriller is like setting yourself a neat agenda of mental and logical tasks to solve. I’ve found that I really enjoy working through in my mind the problems that need to be solved to put a book like this together, and given the very positive reactions to In Deadly Mirrors—check out the reviews on Amazon—it seems readers get something out of it too.
The Son Thief takes place in the year 2002 and begins in a remote village in northern Namibia, where an American private investigator, Sarah Brinson, has traveled to investigate a Catholic priest working there as a missionary and schoolteacher. The priest’s family back home in Grand Rapids, Michigan—the Tylers—can’t shake the strange feeling that their adult son has been acting very strangely since he arrived in Namibia, so strangely that they fear he may not even be the same person they said goodbye to three years previously. Sarah’s investigation, and the true identity of “Father Tyler,” illuminate a bizarre saga involving several murders, a desperate chase across Europe with a bag full of Mafia loot, a weird seaborne cult hiding out aboard a stolen sailing ship, and a financial scandal that reaches into the Vatican. It’s my hope that The Son Thief will keep readers guessing as to each twist that comes next. The book also has the globetrotting international scope and the nautical flavor that made In Deadly Mirrors colorful and unique. It’s been a fun book to write, and, I hope will be a fun one to read.
Though its roots are in my own personal and psychological anxiety, I won’t go so far as to say that The Son Thief is an allegory for climate change. It isn’t; not even close. As with the previous book, though, some parallels to our current situation couldn’t help but creep in. The villain, the titular “Son Thief” who is impersonating Father Tyler—if you’ve read In Deadly Mirrors you might be able to guess his identity—is a pure sociopath who views the world, and everyone around him, in purely transactional terms. The real Father Tyler is an idealistic young man who feels a personal and spiritual calling to do what he sees as the Lord’s work by joining a missionary enterprise in Namibia. His identity is stolen and supplanted by an amoral psychopath who is interested only in what he can gain, and who seems oblivious to the human consequences of his actions. This same mode of thinking underlies the business leaders, politicians and media executives who have created and exacerbated our climate crisis. It’s not that they just don’t care that heat waves, sea level rise and massive species die-offs are happening everywhere as a result of their greed. It’s like they’re unaware that those consequences even exist. They aren’t; just as the faux-Tyler in The Son Thief knows full well what he’s doing, he manages to compartmentalize it and give much fuller priority to his own selfish needs, and somehow he manages to live with himself in spite of having made those choices. That’s how we got into this mess.
As much work as I’ve done in the climate change space, and as outspoken as I’ve been about it—often to my cost, since no one is really listening—the last several years have taught me that I’m small issue to the climate crisis. Passion does not translate into action or results, as much as we’d like to live in a world where that’s a 1:1 exchange. Writing books at least keeps me sane, and that’s an increasingly harder thing to do in our rapidly disintegrating civilization. There’s something highly calming about building the world of these books one letter at a time clacking on my old typewriters. (Yes, I wrote both of these books on antique typewriters). If something comes out of it that can entertain or thrill a reader or two out there, so much the better.
I will let all the readers of this blog know when the preorder phase for The Son Thief opens up. If you want to help me in the meantime, please browse the links in the footer.
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