By Sara Wolfe
Brett Andrew Strange’s Across Latitudes trilogy begins in 2017, a date that matters to the architecture of the story. The former U.S. intelligence officer uses that starting point to place his fictional characters inside a period marked by deepening geopolitical tension, competing narratives, and open warfare.
The complete trilogy includes Against the Dusk, Beneath the Purple Dawn, and Eastern Light. Together, the books follow one continuous story through 2024. At the center are Paul Drake, an Iraq War veteran carrying a violent past, and Katerina Volkova, a Russian-born art curator who becomes caught in the same dangerous current.
The series moves through New York City, Istanbul, California, Paris, Malta, and Sicily before reaching the trenches of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It also touches on the broader instability shaping the Middle East. Strange says those events are not merely scenery for an adventure plot.
“Before Russia’s invasion, there were many false assumptions about global stability and the constant march of global progress,” Strange said. “Across Latitudes opens right at that rupture, in 2017, and the trilogy traces the deception, betrayal, and extra-legal maneuvering underneath conflicts like Ukraine, Syria, and, more recently, Iran.”
That framework gives Across Latitudes a contemporary character. Strange’s stated goal is not to tell readers what conclusion to reach about international affairs. Instead, he places fictional people in situations where political decisions become immediate personal problems.
“These aren’t background events in the books – they’re the terrain the characters traverse to survive,” he said. “I didn’t want to hand readers a moral verdict; I wanted readers to live the drama themselves and let them draw their own conclusions.”
Strange’s background informs that perspective. A former U.S. intelligence officer, he has lived and worked in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia and has traveled to more than two dozen countries as part of his research. He currently lives in San Francisco. His other published work includes Encounters: Six Short Stories.
Asked what his CIA and national security experience contributed to the trilogy, Strange focused on operational reality and the human burden attached to intelligence work.
“It gave me firsthand exposure to the real personalities and raw mechanics of intelligence work – the sacrifice, the deception, the psychological toll,” he said. “My background gave the operational detail its authenticity; the characters are based on real intelligence operations and procedures, not fantasy Hollywood images.”
The story’s geopolitical scale is balanced by intimate stakes. Across Latitudes includes revenge, romance, family strain, and questions about what happens after people survive violence. In Strange’s telling, the major forces of history matter because they put pressure on individual choices.
That is particularly visible in Katerina Volkova’s arc. An art curator rather than a conventional action hero, she becomes one of the trilogy’s central ways of exploring truth, identity, and freedom. Strange has said the characters are deliberately built as composites from people he encountered, including people involved in Ukraine’s fight for independence.
“There’s family strain, there’s doubt, there’s failure,” he said. “The characters are people standing in history’s path, and they need to deal with much larger forces at work around them.”
The complete edition also provides referential footnotes for readers interested in the factual material behind the fiction. That choice reflects the trilogy’s effort to sit close to real events without becoming a textbook or policy argument.
Strange believes the series’ timeliness is part of its appeal.
“The story feels urgent right now – not speculative fiction, but a mirror held up to headlines people are already living through,” he said. “The research behind the settings – Istanbul, Malta, the Ukrainian front – makes the danger tangible.”
The book description extends that idea by presenting the trilogy as an examination of individual agency against the machinery of global power. The political frame is large, but the underlying question remains personal: how can someone preserve identity and judgment when events move faster than any individual can control? That tension links the intelligence plot to the love story, revenge narrative, and family drama running through the series.
The result is a framework in which contemporary conflict is never treated as an abstract map. It becomes a sequence of pressures that alter relationships, loyalties, and the characters’ sense of possibility.
Across Latitudes therefore operates on two levels. It is a political espionage thriller built around covert action and international danger, but it is also a story about people trying to preserve a sense of self when history becomes impossible to ignore. By tying fictional lives to contemporary conflict, Strange aims to make geopolitical instability feel less abstract and more human.
Across Latitudes is available on Amazon.
