What is a Progressive Thriller? Here’s the world’s first in a new 21st Century type of thriller. The action will remind you of classics like Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity (see surprising Thrillerology info inside). The ideas rise to G. K. Chesterton, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, and Margaret Atwood, among other philosophical writers. More timely than ever in the US national nightmare of 2017. If you are a Progressive, democratic thinker - you’ll find this novel relevant, exciting, and refreshing - new ideas instead of tired old thriller cliches. Two young ex-pats from California–Rick Buchan and Hannah Smith, both 25–are on the run for their lives in Europe. They don’t know each other until their paths intersect in an alley behind a bar called The 39th Step in Bagnolet, Paris. They witness a cold-blooded murder executed by killers working for a Chinese billionaire named Wan. The object of the chase (or McGuffin, as Alfred Hitchcock used to put it) is a data package for a radical new technology called Intelligent Fuselage Skin (IFS), Hannah, a BAN (contract slave in the new world odor), stole from Wan while escaping from his private luxury jet in Paris. In all John T. Cullen novels, you enjoy a strong female lead and a strong male lead, brought together under dire circumstances, who fall deeply and movingly in love. The rousing love story, the breathless thriller, and the story of ideas are parallel and entwined elements of a well-told tale you will long not forget. This novel includes some of the hottest and most passionate love scenes ever written–integral to the story. Rick Buchan is a U.S. Army deserter, on the run after being unjustly accused of a serious crime he did not commit. He is a combat veteran suffering from PTSD and half out of it, when Hannah rescues him and they take off north by north east toward Luxembourg. Hannah has mailed the IFS to herself in Luxembourg, and plans to deliver it to Professor Hilaire Sander–whose son Pierre was murdered by Wan’s hit men in London to steal the IFS data, which Pierre had developed for peaceful uses. Wan plans to run for president of the global Chief Executive Officers’ Confederacy (CEOC), an organization of the world’s wealthiest 1,000 families, who own most global wealth. He wants IFS to show that CEOC militaries can defeat any national force in the world. Professor Sander promotes the Progressive Alliance for Peace (PAX). He will challenge Wan for presidency of the CEOC parliament at their annual conference, at Chateau Ansembourg in Luxembourg’s Valley of the Seven Castles. This Progressive Thriller hits hard on the story front - while advocating for Progressive causes as the only hope for democracy, freedom, human rights, and the global ecology. News stories tell us that today, 63 billionaires own over half of the world’s wealth–most of these from former 3rd World Countries and the new Capitalist China. Our world is becoming a new medieval network of warring, feudal baronies called corporations - linked by their allegiance to a universal church of Greed, whose only god is Profit, whose theology is: might makes right. Professor Sander (the journey’s Wise Elder) seeks a peaceful, Constitutional revolution at the ballot box. He is a Resistance hero - for peace and balance. He seeks not to destroy corporations but to fulfill them (so to speak) by creating a balance of workers, owners, and society at large. Corporations own 99% of the media and lie to us constantly–we do not have a free, honest, impartial press. Whatever happened to objective journalism? So many politicians are bribed and owned by corporate interests, constantly shutting the government down to weaken it for their corporate owners–to kill unions, health care, workplace safety, minimum wages, distort the Constitution… Anything good for working families is evil socialism and must be destroyed in favor of limitless tyranny by a tiny, powerful investor class. More info at the Clocktower