"Mr. Needham seems to know rather more about these things than one ought." — The Wall Street Journal Asia Once a high-flying international lawyer, a member of the innermost circles of government power, Jack Shepherd has abandoned the savage politics of Washington for the lethargic backwater of Bangkok, where he is now just an unremarkable professor at an unimportant university in an insignificant city. Or is he? A secretive Asian bank collapses under dubious circumstances. A former law partner Shepherd thought dead reveals himself as the force behind the disgraced bank and coerces Shepherd into helping him track the hundreds of millions of dollars that disappeared in the collapse. A twisting trail of deceit leads Shepherd from Bangkok to Hong Kong and eventually to an isolated villa on the fabled island of Phuket where he confronts the evil at the heart of a monstrous game of international treachery. A lawyer among people who laugh at the law, a friend in a land where today's allies are tomorrow's fugitives, Jack Shepherd battles the global tide of corruption, extortion and murder that is fast engulfing the new life he has made for himself in Thailand.

Plato Karsarkis was an international celebrity straight out of Vanity Fair until a New York grand jury indicted him for smuggling Iraqi oil and charged him with racketeering and espionage. There was also the matter of a woman he may or may not have murdered to cover it all up. When Karsarkis flees the United States just ahead of the FBI and promptly vanishes, the world's media whips itself into a frenzy. Jack Shepherd was a politically connected American lawyer until he traded the fierce intrigues of Washington for the quiet life in Bangkok. Then one day he walks into a bar on the jet-set island of Phuket and finds the world's most famous fugitive waiting for him. Karsarkis wants to hire him. He wants a presidential pardon so he can return to American and he knows Shepherd's connections to the White House just might get it for him. But the U.S. Marshals are in Phuket as well and they want something from Shepherd, too. They're there to kidnap Karsarkis and take him back to the US for trial and the Marshals want Shepherd to help them set a trap. What Shepherd wants is for everybody to go away and leave him alone. At least he does until he discovers a chilling secret, one that plunges him a violent spiral of friendship and betrayal and pulls him straight back into the life he thought he had left behind in Washington. The Marshals aren't really in Phuket to arrest Plato Karsarkis. They're there to kill him.

Jack Shepherd was sick of Washington politics, sick of corporate law, and even a little sick of himself. So he hit the road looking for a new start, made a couple of wrong turns, and somehow wound up in Hong Kong. Now he needs a job, and being General Chalerm Kitnarock's lawyer is a job, so he takes it. Shepherd could certainly have done a lot worse for himself. Charlie Kitnarok is the world's ninety-eighth richest man. But he's also a former prime minister of Thailand now living in exile in Dubai. When he's not making money, he's plotting his return to political power. For Shepherd, that could be a real problem. Thailand already has a prime minister, and she's a woman with whom Shepherd once had a brief relationship. It will get particularly messy if, as Shepherd suspects, Charlie is smuggling arms to his supporters and intends to use the Thai army to seize control of the country. Can Shepherd keep his two friends from destroying each other and prevent Thailand from sliding into chaos? Thailand is hurtling closer and closer to a bloody civil war. And as unlikely as it may sound, Jack Shepherd is probably the only person on earth who can stop it.

JACK SHEPHERD is the kind of lawyer some people call a troubleshooter. At least that's what they call him when they're being polite. The truth is, Shepherd is the guy people go to when they have a problem too ugly to tell anyone else about. He locates the trouble for them, and then he shoots it. Neat, huh? If life were only that simple... One of the world's largest casino operators hires Shepherd to stop a massive money laundering operation targeting its casino in Macau, a tiny place on the South China Coast that is the biggest gambling center on earth. While Shepherd is looking for the source of the black money moving through the MGM Macau, a frightened man approaches him who claims to have detailed knowledge of the most secret schemes of the North Korean government. All Shepherd's new pal wants in return for spilling all those secrets is political asylum in the United States and a house in Hawaii. Plunged into a modern-day Casablanca on the South China Sea—a bubbling caldron of gangsters, gunrunners, money launderers, hustlers, gamblers, con men, and spies—Shepherd joins forces with the beautiful and enigmatic daughter of a man everybody calls the King of Macau to shut down the black money flow and bring his defector in alive. Move too fast, and he'll lose control of everything. Move too slow...and Macau just might kill him.

Jack Shepherd is the kind of lawyer some people call a troubleshooter. He finds the trouble and then he shoots it. If his life were only that simple. Shepherd is tiptoeing around Hong Kong's financial back alleys looking for a billion dollars or so that went missing in Malaysia when an old friend from Bangkok turns up and dumps a much bigger problem in his lap. A military coup has swept over Thailand. The Thai army is holding Thailand's first female prime minister under house arrest and her life is in danger. There was a time when Shepherd loved Thailand, then things went sour and he's sworn never to go back. But the prime minister is a woman with whom Shepherd once had a relationship of a sort, and Shepherd is loyal to his friends. He's also a sucker for a woman who is smart and beautiful, but of course that has nothing at all to do with it. Whatever the reason, Shepherd can feel it happening. Thailand is reeling him right back in no matter how hard he struggles to stay away. Okay, he decides, how hard can it be? Track down the missing money in Malaysian, then sneak into Thailand, grab his old friend right out from under the noses of the entire Thai army, and keep her alive long enough to get them both out of Thailand. A piece of cake for the old troubleshooter, huh? "JACK SHEPHERD IS A DELIGHT, A SHARP-WITTED LAWYER WITH A DRIVE FOR JUSTICE FORCED TO LIVE IN A WORLD OF HARD MEN WHO DON'T BELIEVE IN THE RULE OF LAW" — The Malaysia Star

THERE WERE NINETEEN HIJACKERS YOU KNOW ABOUT. AND ONE YOU DON’T. In January 2000, nearly a dozen of Osama bin Laden's most trusted lieutenants gathered secretly in Malaysia to plan an attack on America, an attack the world would one day call 9/11. When the meeting ended, some of the Al-Qaeda commanders returned to Afghanistan, but the rest went to Bangkok. Why did they go to Bangkok after the plan for 9/11 was in motion? No one knew. The CIA lost track of them. THE NINETEEN is a novel about four Americans in Bangkok who banded together in January 2000 to do what the CIA couldn’t do. Find the Al-Qaeda commanders in the city and discover what they were planning. They got close. Tantalizingly close. They just didn’t get quite close enough. After the World Trade Center vanished in a cloud of fire and dust, they looked at the photographs of the smoldering ruins and realized they might have stopped it. They thought nothing could be worse than knowing they had failed. Then they discovered there was something worse. There was something much worse. “THE NINETEEN is a remarkable book, especially the last few chilling chapters. Wow. Breathtaking stuff. ” - Brendan DuBois, New York Times #1 bestselling author