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Get ready for The Wartmann Series, launching in 2026 with the award-winning Friendship Games and the forthcoming The Compass Room!

I've written previously about the titles of my first two novels, Alter Road (2020) and Friendship Games (2023), and how they came about. In both cases, I had a different working title that would eventually be abandoned in favor of those two titles.

In the aftermath of a catastrophic naval disaster in the Persian Gulf, the United States is thrust into a war it cannot finish—and a crisis it cannot control. As missile strikes reach American soil and the global order begins to fracture, President Cynthia Belle retreats to a secure bunker, paralyzed by indecision. Left to face the fallout is her...

Vice President George "Daddy Longlegs" Wartmann has spent his career in the shadows—until the sinking of the USS George W. Bush forces him into the spotlight. From the Compass Room at Number One Observatory Circle, he plots a daring evacuation of Americans stranded in the Middle East while global powers jockey for influence. Facing...

It's been over two years since I wrote a review of Blaine Pardoe's Blue Dawn. My apologies to Mr. Pardoe for taking so long to get around to reading book 2 in the Blue Dawn series, A Most Uncivil War. It was on my reading list, but in preparation for my own follow up to a book, Friendship Games...

Manuscript for book #3 - the follow-up to Friendship Games - is done!

Tayfun Ulusoy flew into Baghdad as his first foreign assignment as Grand Vizier. The international airport at Baghdad was captured by Türkiye's special forces, the Bordo Bereliler—the Maroon Berets—not long before they had liberated the American Embassy there.

That's right, I've reached the halfway point for book #3.

It's been seven months - seven! - since I reported reaching 20,000 words with novel #3.

Mark James' Friendship Games is a masterful geo-political thriller that follows the deadly consequences of an explosion in the Persian Gulf, when an American aircraft carrier, the USS George W. Bush, is attacked and sunk. A thrilling look at the chaos of modern warfare, this gripping narrative spans continents, perspectives, and ideologies,...