Read an excerpt from The Writing       on the Wall

The Writing on the Wall

This election season’s clincher

Iraq was only a prelude to the horrors of an eventual war with Iran.

A coalition of aching-for-Armageddon televangelists, big oil, and false prophets of democracy manipulate maverick, straight-talking Senator-become-President-in ‘08, Jim Whitman into aerial strikes against Tehran. This is a confrontation he knows the United States must avoid by all means. Yet the spirits he has cited and pandered to on his road to the White House no longer follow his command. When the cakewalk into Iran becomes a gauntlet, the Vietnam veteran-turned-dove-by-conscience is soon decried as a reckless warmonger by the public and besieged in the West Wing by cut-and-run protesters while the American Empire stumbles over the abyss into a military quagmire, economic depression and possible nuclear war.

Meanwhile, three student-days friends and former lovers find themselves propelled by fate to the top of their country’s delegation negotiating the future of the Middle East. Seran, a Kurdish refugee raised in America, made his career in the oil business, yet behind the scenes works for an independent Kurdish state. From the moment she discovered her father had collaborated with the CIA in dictatorial Greece, diplomat Elia’s life and thinking is subordinated to her pathological hatred of America and severing her beloved Europe from her self-defeating ties to the United States. Bryan, a moderate Democrat, sees his patriotism and religious beliefs betrayed by the Bush Administration’s abuse of 9/11 and pledges to never let Whitman produce a similar duplicity.

President Whitman has tied all his hopes for America’s viability in the Persian Gulf and his personal legacy to these political talks. Negotiations in which deception is standard operating procedure, abusing another’s love and ideology for your own ends becomes mandatory, alliances and disguises shift like dancers at a masked ball choreographed by Machiavelli, and on whose outcome the survival of millions depend.

The Writing on the Wall is as much a no-holds-barred accounting of the last six years as a forceful premonition of what may follow. With provocative frankness and an abundance of political allusions some will find too realistic to handle, this cautionary tale exposes the forces that opened the Pandora’s Box of the Middle East. Through stirring personal fates, it guides us into the gray area where today’s frightening fiction can become the future’s bloody fact. A future we may still have the power to change.