By: Seth Adams
Espionage novels often ask readers to accept extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. Brett Andrew Strange approached his Across Latitudes trilogy from another direction. A former U.S. intelligence officer, he wanted the story to remain grounded in recognizable human behavior, even when the characters are caught inside clandestine operations, war, and geopolitical upheaval.
Strange is the author of Against the Dusk, Beneath the Purple Dawn, and Eastern Light, the three novels that make up Across Latitudes. He has also written Encounters: Six Short Stories. His research has taken him to more than two dozen countries, and he has lived and worked in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. He currently lives in San Francisco.
Across Latitudes follows Paul Drake, an Iraq War veteran with a violent history, and Katerina Volkova, a Russian-born art curator whose life is drawn into the same international struggle. The trilogy spans 2017 through 2024 and moves through New York City, Istanbul, California, Paris, Malta, Sicily, and the war in Ukraine.
For Strange, realism begins with character. He says the people in the trilogy are composites rather than direct portraits, shaped from individuals he encountered through intelligence work, travel, and research.
“They’re composites, not portraits, but very deliberately grounded ones, including U.S. intelligence officers and people actively involved in Ukraine’s fight for independence,” Strange said. “If anything, I’d say I wanted to create characters as a hybrid of real people so they seemed to have independent fictional will and were psychologically honest.”
That psychological honesty also applies to antagonists, supporting characters, and people with limited power. Strange uses a close third-person style that shifts perspective rather than locking the story inside the mind of a single hero.
“Readers keep coming back to the close third-person perspective of the narrative, the way it gets inside the heads of the villains, protagonists, and even children, so you understand the drama from multiple perspectives,” he said. “That’s paired with a fast-thriller pace.”
The supporting cast includes a teenage Syrian refugee and a nine-year-old Ukrainian orphan. Those characters broaden the story beyond professional intelligence officers and political actors, showing how large conflicts affect people with little ability to control events.
The trilogy’s violence is also written to resist routine action-thriller rhythms. Strange says readers have noticed that it arrives abruptly rather than as a predictable sequence.
“The violence itself isn’t predictable. It’s sudden and fierce, which readers say adds intensity,” he said.
His intelligence background provided another layer of authenticity. In discussing what most helped him as an author, Strange emphasized the human and procedural sides of the work rather than gadgets or spectacle.
“It gave me firsthand exposure to the real personalities and raw mechanics of intelligence work, the sacrifice, the deception, the psychological toll,” Strange said. “My background gave the operational detail its authenticity. The characters are based on real intelligence operations and procedures, not fantasy Hollywood images.”
That goal also explains Strange’s criticism of common espionage conventions. He wanted characters who could fail, doubt themselves, damage relationships, and misread situations.
“Most espionage fiction today either leans on stale Hollywood formula or slides into exaggerated fantasy, invincible heroes, cartoonish villains,” he said. “I wanted the opposite for the thoughtful and careful reader.”
The book description similarly frames the trilogy as a story about the tension between individual agency and global power. Its characters are forced to make choices while facing systems and conflicts that are far larger than any one person.
Strange’s research reinforces this grounded method. Because the series crosses borders repeatedly, location is treated as part of the story rather than a generic backdrop. Istanbul, Malta, Sicily, Paris, and Ukraine each carry different political and cultural pressures. The complete trilogy’s referential footnotes offer an additional layer for readers who want to distinguish documented context from the fictional narrative built around it.
By keeping those details tied to vulnerable characters, Strange uses authenticity as a storytelling tool rather than as technical display, making procedural credibility serve the emotional stakes of the narrative.
Strange does not present realism as a rejection of momentum. Across Latitudes is still designed as a thriller, with international movement, covert activity, personal revenge, romance, and escalating danger. The distinction is that its suspense grows from vulnerable people rather than superheroes.
For readers who want added context, the complete trilogy edition includes referential footnotes tied to facts behind the fiction. That feature reinforces Strange’s larger project: telling a fast-moving espionage story while keeping one foot in documented reality and the other in the uncertain psychology of people placed under pressure.
For more information, visit the Across Latitudes: The Complete Trilogy page on Amazon.
