Bradley West
Explanations of conspiracies fascinate me, but only plausible ones. My fiction addresses various conspiracies or unsolved mysteries in what I hope is a believable fashion. Of course, I’m not offering a definitive solution to riddles such as the disappearance of flight MH370. Do I think hijackers landed MH370 in the Balochistan desert? No. .... more
Explanations of conspiracies fascinate me, but only plausible ones. My fiction addresses various conspiracies or unsolved mysteries in what I hope is a believable fashion. Of course, I’m not offering a definitive solution to riddles such as the disappearance of flight MH370. Do I think hijackers landed MH370 in the Balochistan desert? No. Do I think mechanical malfunction caused a pilotless MH370 to fly along a Doppler-defined arc only to disappear forever in the Southern Ocean? No. More than three years after the disappearance, there is still plenty to be learned about MH370’s fate. I hope Sea of Lies and Pack of Lies prompt others to ask the governments leading the search efforts—the US, Australia, France and Malaysia come to mind—to share all their findings with the public. Recall that, “None of is smarter than all of us.”
Nevertheless, I started writing the Lies thriller series—the next installment, End of Lies, is in the works—to entertain rather than persuade the world of the rightness of my interpretations of otherwise unsatisfactorily explained sequences of events or calamities. These books are works of fiction and not investigative journalism.
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I’m originally from Ohio but was always interested in living and working abroad, so I completed an undergraduate degree at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. My first job after an MBA from London Business School lasted less than two months before my boss shipped me to Singapore for a four-month project to keep me away from head office (rather than undertake anything momentous in the Far East). That short-term project is now in its thirty-fourth year. Along the way, I’ve been fortunate enough to live mostly in Singapore, but also logged many years in Hong Kong with stops in Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore and Colombo.
Pack of Lies is the outgrowth of the unanswered mysteries and conspiracies dangling at the end of Sea of Lies, supplemented by a crazy world where every day brings a new surprise in international affairs. Pack of Lies continues with the MH370 saga and adds to it three other threads: a corrupt Malaysia prime minister, Osama bin Laden’s lost years in Pakistan, and Iran’s hunger for nuclear weapons. I’ve worked in and visited each of the countries prominently featured in Pack of Lies, though I admit to being rusty on Pakistan.
I live in Singapore, where I’m a keen mountain biker, former baseball coach and avid fisherman. I enjoy red wine, dark chocolate and raucous friends around the table.