Having served as a Canadian diplomat and aid worker in the Middle East for several years, he knows the land and people well, and has a firm grip on hills and valleys, swamps and jungles of the political topography as well.” - Timothy Niedermann, The Ottawa Review of Books (click here for full review) “(

Ian Thomas Shaw is one of those rare authors.

So it is very uncommon to find an author who not only sets his story in the Middle East, but who can both keep the facts straight and also avoid turning individuals and regional populations into two-dimensional caricatures. But by doing so, they tend to oversimplify, even ignore, the overwhelming complexity that burdens the daily lives of those who live there. Most authors try to keep their plot lines as simple as possible to avoid getting inextricably bogged down in the convoluted details of local reality. There is a catch, though, and that is that it is very hard to keep all of the political, ethnic and religious issues straight. “The Middle East is an extreme of everything and thus fertile ground for thriller writers: a rich and varied history, current political chaos, violence on every level, religious strife, tribal factions galore, and everywhere really bad guys who would be barely credible in fiction but for the fact that they pepper the evening news almost every day.

Bittersweet Symphony by Rebecca McNutt