With civil liberties finally making its way into the public discourse, now is the perfect time for the launch of my new novel, Kingmaker.

As we all know, a large part of politics is about controlling the message. That means steering the national conversation toward certain topics, and away from others. For too long, American politics have been dominated by issues that, in an advanced and modern society, should have been left behind us a long time ago — issues that have distracted us from far more important debates, and probably the most important debate of all: civil liberties.

Kingmaker is about a lot of things. Ostensibly, it’s about a disaffected Russian spy who sees parallels between the direction of a near-future United States and what he and his parents went through both in the Soviet Union, and in a Putin-era (and even post Putin-era) Russia. It’s about economic and ethnic stratification, human trafficking, and unbound corporate greed and power. It’s about video games, drones, artificial intelligence, bad-ass military mechs, and futuristic weapons and vehicles. But at its core, it’s about the importance of protecting and promoting freedom — not just for the privileged, but for everyone.

All that said, I actually don’t consider Kingmaker to be a political novel. First and foremost, it is an entertaining near-future thriller with plenty of action and technology. But whenever called upon to both predict and depict the future, it’s impossible not to touch on salient social and political themes, and the primary theme around which Kingmaker revolves happens to be one of the most basic and important of them all.

Kingmaker is now available in digital, paperback, and audio formats.