John W. Feist is the author of a series of political thrillers, Night Rain, Tokyo (2018), Blind Trust (2019), and Doubt and Debt (2021), plus a literary novel, The Color of Rain (2021), all from Winter Wheat Press. He is a semiretired corporate lawyer living in Falls Church, Virginia.
He grew up as an only child in Horton and Lawrence, Kansas, two of the towns featured in The Color of Rain. He studied philosophy for his AB at the University of Kansas and earned his JD at Stanford Law School.
John’s law career planted the seeds for Night Rain, Tokyo, Blind Trust, and Doubt and Debt, with their lawyer-protagonist, observations of Japanese culture, and high-stakes international business deals. For twenty years, he counseled Kaiser Industries Corporation’s steel fabricating, pipe-making, coal mining, and shipping units. Since 1994 he has been general counsel to a consortium of electric and gas utilities in the US and Canada which sponsor energy efficiency projects in residential, commercial and industrial sectors.
Several of Kaiser's international trade projects took John to Japan and Canada. From those experiences, and his few years as a lobbyist in Washington on behalf of Western steelmakers, John drew ideas and impressions for his suspense fiction.
The Color of Rain is set in Kansas, in 1896-97. The origins of that novel are the actual courtship letters exchanged between John’s grandparents: Frank, a Horton banker, and Irene, a Nortonville, Kansas, schoolteacher. For The Color of Rain, John drew on the complete collection of those letters, together with his own recollection of living with Grandmother Irene in the Horton house that is central to the story.
