Luis Ojeda owes his life to the Pacifico Norte cartel. Literally. Now it’s time to pay.
Luis helped American Muslims escape the U.S. during the ten years following a major terrorist attack on Chicago. He retired after a border guard left him near death. Now in 2032, the Nortes give Luis a choice: pay back the fortune they spent saving his life, or take on a special client: Nora Khaled.
Nora – FBI agent, mother, and Muslim – knows her husband will be exiled to one of the nation’s remote prison camps to rot with over 400,000 other Muslim Americans. Faced with her family’s destruction, she’s forced to turn to Luis, the kind of man she’s spent her career bringing to justice.
But when the FBI publicly accuses Nora of terrorism, Luis learns Nora has proof that the nation’s recent history is based on a lie – a lie that reaches to the government’s highest levels.
Torn between self-preservation and the last shreds of his idealism, Luis guides Nora and her family toward refuge in civil war-wracked Mexico. The FBI, a dogged ICE agent, killer drones, bandits, and the fearsome Zeta cartel all plan to stop him. Success might free Luis from the Nortes… but failure means disappearing into a black-site prison, or a gruesome death for them all.
"South is a compelling futuristic thriller, as convincing a cautionary novel as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was in its day...I really got the feeling, reading this, that these were real people forced to live in terrible times, and I was only too happy to cheer them on—or cry over their tragedies—as the novel raced to its conclusion."
"South is a riveting work of action/adventure suspense that is a real page-turner of a novel. Author Lance Charnes demonstrates a truly impressive knack for deftly creating a complex and thoroughly engaging story that grabs and holds the reader’s rapt attention from beginning to end. A novel that could be ripped from today’s headlines about cross-border narco-terrorism, South is highly recommended..."
