The Books

A Spy, a Girl and an Island — Volume One

Book One of The Island Series

At nineteen, Charles Boulos leaves Lebanon for London with one suitcase, a talent for reading people and numbers, and an incurable love of the horizon. A hotel job is supposed to be the beginning of an ordinary life. Then he meets Emma Whitmore, a beautiful Englishwoman who answers every question about her job with a kiss.

When the formidable Victoria Ashcombe spots Charles’s unusual instincts, the two of them are drawn into British intelligence and forged into an exceptional team. Emma brings discipline, courage and deadly precision. Charles brings financial insight, improvisation and a sense of humor that survives gunfire, hostile governments and the occasional criminal absence of a decent latte.

From London and East Berlin to Colombia, Washington and Qatar, they follow money through charities, corporations and secret accounts toward a network of arms dealers and extremists. Along the way, Faisal and Layal Al-Khatib enter their lives first as clients and then as chosen family.

But when their rescue plane flies off without them in the desert, Charles and Emma realize that someone on their own side wants them dead. And the person who knows the truth may be closer than either of them imagined.

Through every danger, Charles holds on to one private dream: a warm island, a small beach bar, cold beer, good coffee and a life in which nobody is waiting to send them on another mission.

Volume One of A Spy, a Girl and an Island, Book One of The Island Series. An international adventure full of romance, humor and suspense. The story continues in Volume Two.

Available soon on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.

A Spy, a Girl and an Island — Volume Two

Book One of The Island Series

Presumed dead, Charles and Emma come home and start asking questions.

Someone walked into their London flat without leaving a trace and left a photograph on their bed. Their friend Faisal Al-Khatib is alive, bruised, exhausted and running out of time. A secret payment points to a company called Meridian, and to a man two floors from Margaret Hale’s office.

From Washington to London, and from night parachute jumps into storms to Marrakesh, Paris and the snows of Iceland, they follow Meridian to the top. The conspiracy hunting them reaches inside the intelligence services of both Britain and America, and when the people they trust turn out to be keeping secrets, Charles and Emma stop waiting to be rescued and decide to finish it themselves.

Then comes the most frightening assignment of Charles’s career: asking Victoria Ashcombe for her blessing to marry Emma. Her answer will change everything they thought they knew about their family, their past and each other.

The dead have come home. Now they want answers.

Volume Two of A Spy, a Girl and an Island, Book One of The Island Series. Begin with Volume One. The story concludes in Volume Three.

Available soon on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.

A Spy, a Girl and an Island — Volume Three

Book One of The Island Series

Charles and Emma have done the impossible: they have retired.

Married on a Caribbean island and surrounded by a family they never knew they had, they are finally free to look for the small beach bar, cold beer and surfboards Charles has dreamed of for years. No more six o’clock calls. No more false passports.

Then, over a breakfast of manakish and coffee, Layal brings them a secret she can no longer carry: evidence of armed networks preparing coordinated attacks in Britain and America, shielded by people at the very highest levels of power. One last job becomes a race across Scotland and the Caribbean, and it ends in a quiet room with a King who has run out of allies.

But the greatest adventure is still ahead. A crumbling island house. An English country estate bought for one pound and turned into something extraordinary. A pregnancy that, this time, is for real. And a little bar beside the sea, where Lebanon, cold Cedar Beer and a lifetime of stories finally meet.

One last job. And then, at last, the island.

Volume Three of A Spy, a Girl and an Island, the final volume of Book One of The Island Series. The story of Charles, Emma, their family and friends continues in Book Two, The Island Was Supposed to Be the End.

Available soon on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.

The Island Was Supposed to Be the End

Book Two of The Island Series

Retired at last, Charles and Emma Boulos have traded missions for a Caribbean island, their children, their friends and a beach bar where Charles wages a losing war for a respectable latte. The island was supposed to be the end of secrets, operations and people trying to kill them.

Then Victoria Ashcombe and Margaret Hale, Emma’s mother and aunt and the two women who shaped their lives, disappear in Morocco.

Charles and Emma leave the safety of home and reunite with their oldest friends, Faisal and Layal, to find them. An abandoned vehicle becomes a trail through Tangier, London, Beirut and Doha, leading into forgotten intelligence files, hidden medical records, compromised officials and a network that has spent years erasing its own history.

Every answer opens another door. Old allies may have been watched for decades. Someone is cleaning house, and somewhere inside British and American intelligence, information is leaking to people who know Charles and Emma’s methods almost as well as they do. The closer the four friends come to Victoria and Margaret, the clearer it becomes that the kidnappings are part of something far larger than revenge.

Sometimes peace is having a home worth fighting your way back to.

Book Two of The Island Series, following A Spy, a Girl and an Island.

Available soon on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.

The Children of the Island

Book Three of The Island Series

For eighteen years, the twins George and Lori Ann Boulos have grown up on their parents’ Caribbean island, learning chess, languages and observation from their grandmother Victoria, research from their great-aunt Margaret, and humor from their father Charles, a retired spy still losing his long war with the coffee machine. Now they are leaving home: George, a boxer, for Georgetown and then Harvard Law School; Lori Ann, a basketball player, for Wharton and then MIT.

In Boston they meet Sofia Bennett, a human-rights law student and the daughter of an American diplomat, and Daniel Haddad, a student of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence with a gift for walking into the wrong room. The four become inseparable, and as their studies lead them into hidden investments and deleted server records, they become an investigative team.

What begins in the classroom turns into real danger: a safe house that is not a house, a woman waiting for her missing brother, a wrong flight, a room without air and a shipping container numbered 417. The trail runs from the United States to Europe and Beirut, while Charles and Emma watch their children step into the kind of danger they once knew themselves.

Friendship deepens into love, the four put their names on a door of their own, and the story returns to the island where it began, with a King who arrives as a tourist and leaves with a hundred cases of Cedar Beer.

Book Three of The Island Series: a new generation steps into the world with their parents’ courage, their own conscience and the family’s unbreakable sense of humor.

Available soon on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.

The Flight That Never Landed

Book Four of The Island Series

Charles and Emma have finally found what they spent a lifetime chasing: quiet. An island, a small bar, and no more need to lie for a living.

The quiet ends at two in the morning, when Layal calls to say that Faisal’s private aircraft has vanished from radar over the Mediterranean. There is no wreckage, no distress call and no explanation.

What begins as a search for a missing friend becomes something older and more personal: a debt from Charles and Emma’s past that was never truly settled. The search leads to a pilot with three names, a hangar outside Casablanca, a flight to Dakar, a man who sold twelve years of his life, a ship that once belonged to Faisal and a girl in Istanbul, along a network of pilots, ships and hidden accounts stretching from Morocco and West Africa to the Atlantic coast of Brazil.

The people holding Faisal know exactly who Charles and Emma are, and exactly what it will cost them to come out of retirement one more time. Old enemies, old favors and old loyalties all come due. And back on the island, the coffee, to Charles’s dismay, improves in his absence.

Book Four of The Island Series: a novel about old friendships, older debts, and how far two people will go for the family they have built.

Available soon on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.

The Island Where They Met and Its Legacy

Book Five of The Island Series

Anthony Mansour believes he is taking his wife Claire and their children, Joe and Amanda, on a quiet family holiday to a Caribbean island. He has no idea the trip will change the direction of their lives.

The island is home to Charles and Emma Boulos, two retired intelligence officers, their teenage twins George and Lori Ann, and the beach bar Charles bought years ago. Within an hour Anthony and Charles discover that their families came from hills forty minutes apart above Beirut. They share a Cedar Beer. Then Anthony tastes Charles’s latte and concludes that the man has no idea what he is doing with his espresso machine. A friendship begins.

A piece of land on the ridge above the bay becomes a hotel built by island hands and staffed by island families, then a second and a third. Years later, Joe and Amanda open Mansour & Mansour, Risk and Financial Advisory, in Washington, and a small London case that went into a drawer comes back out with one telephone call: eighty-six million dollars are gone.

From London and Paris to the court of a young Crown Prince, the next generation follows the money through a company that never existed, a children’s charity used as cover and a quiet designer of fraud who always seems to slip away.

Book Five of The Island Series: the families of A Spy, a Girl and an Island and The Guest Who Never Checked Out come together on the island where it all began.

Coming soon on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.

The Voyage That Never Came Back and the Sea That Always Remembers

Book Six of The Island Series

For ten years, every spring, two women have sailed the same coastline for Victoria’s birthday: Victoria Ashcombe, once the head of British intelligence, and her half-sister Margaret Hale, who ran Charles and Emma from Washington in another life. Victoria argues about the anchovies. Margaret chooses the wine. This year, over Charles’s objections, the boat is already booked.

The sloop never comes back.

For Emma, it is her mother and her aunt. For George and Lori Ann, it is their grandmother. For Joe and Amanda, it is a squall that does not add up: a regular crewman called away by a “family emergency”, a stranger in his place, and a rigging line cut by someone who knew exactly what he was doing.

What follows takes two retired intelligence officers back into the field and carries the family from Washington to Frankfurt, Doha, a boarding house in Colón and a courtroom in Bogotá. Old friendships are called in. A kingdom opens its doors. And a letter Margaret left with her solicitor reveals the secret the two women carried onto that boat.

Book Six of The Island Series: a story of loss, justice and a family that keeps coming home to the same beach. Because some voyages never come back. And the sea, like this family, always remembers.

Coming soon on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.