Interview: Lance Charnes Author of ZRADA #Interview

Lance Charnes has been an Air Force intelligence officer, information technology manager, computer-game artist, set designer, and Jeopardy! contestant, and is now an emergency management specialist. He’s had training in architectural rendering, terrorist incident response, and maritime archaeology, though not all at the same time. His Facebook author page features spies, archaeology, and art crime.

Lance is the author of the DeWitt Agency Files series of international art-crime novels (The Collection, Stealing Ghosts, and Chasing Clay), the international thriller Doha 12, and the near-future thriller South. All are available in trade paperback and digital editions.

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Welcome to The Writer's Life! Now that your book has been published, we’d love to find out more about the process. Can we begin by having you take us at the beginning? When did you come up with the idea to write your book?

Back in late 2017, when I was looking for a plot for the third book in my DeWitt Agency Files art-crime series, I ran across a news article about an art heist in the Westfries Museum in the Netherlands. Thieves broke into the museum in 2005 and made off with 24 paintings. Ten years later, the paintings turned up in the hands of a far-right militia in the Ukraine. The militia said it wanted to return the artworks for a “finder’s fee,” but the €50,000 the museum offered wasn’t enough. Eventually, the Ukrainian security agency recovered four of the paintings and returned them to the Westfries, and another person turned in a fifth painting. The rest have disappeared.

When I saw this, I thought: what a great setup! I can have Matt Friedrich (my series lead) go to Ukraine to pick up stolen paintings, but the deal goes south and he’s stuck in the Donbass with people trying to kill him. He’s not an action hero; what would he do? I started writing at the beginning of 2018 and quickly found that Matt was exactly the wrong protagonist for this story. I put it on the shelf for almost two years, then dusted it off at the beginning of 2020 with a new lead: Matt’s sidekick Carson, a disgraced female ex-cop who’s much better at this sort of thing. That’s the version now coming out as Zrada.

Who is your publisher and how did you find them or did you self-publish?

I’ve been indie published since 2012.

Is there anything that surprised you about getting your first book published?

My first published book – Doha 12, an international spy thriller – was easier to write than get published. I tried the legacy publishing route and got nowhere with it. Getting a book through the legacy publishing system is like hitting the lottery four times in a row. After a while, I figured I had nothing to lose by publishing Doha 12 myself; there was a process, there were distribution outlets, and there was getting to be an ecosystem of service providers. It’s a lot of work. Anyone who says that indie authors are lazy has no idea how hard we have to work to get a good product on the market.

Do you believe a book cover plays an important role in the selling process?

Very much so. The cover is the face of a book. It tells a reader what kind of story is inside and the general premise. It’s also a sales tool: the cover has to grab a reader while she’s scrolling through a list of books on Amazon or Barnes & Noble and make her want to click the title to find out more. That’s a lot to ask of an inch-tall picture. If it doesn’t stand out, the book will never sell.

How hard was it to write a book like this and do you have any tips that you could pass on which would make the journey easier for other writers?

Zrada is different from my other five books because it doesn’t happen in a well-documented Western city. Carson spends most of the story running around the countryside outside Donetsk, getting shot at. There’s a lot of documentation of the war in the Donbass but not of the countryside itself. What do these little farm towns look like? Are these paved roads or gravel? Where do people go to eat or shop? I ended up harvesting hundreds of photos from various places, especially Ukrainian and Russian websites, and spent a lot of time peering at the overhead imagery on Google Earth to get a feel for the terrain and the buildings.

What should other writers do if they’re silly enough to take this on? Cast a wide net for reference material. Think about foreign equivalents to the tools you use every day. (Yandex, for instance, is the Russian version of Google; it has its own map utility, which has much more detailed maps of Eastern Europe.) Learn to use non-English search terms. The information’s out there, but it won’t be as easy to find as it would be if you set your book in New York City or London.

What other books are you working on and when will they be published?

I’m outlining the sequel to Zrada and hope to get started on it in the next month or so. I usually release my novels in November.

What’s one fact about your book that would surprise people?

The thing that surprised me most is that the Donbass residents are no longer doing the bulk of the fighting. The Russian Army has essentially taken over the war against the Ukrainian government and has the resources to string it out as long as it wants to. Many separatists are disillusioned with the Russians because these “allies” won’t annex the Donbass, but also won’t let it go free.

Finally, what message are you trying to get across with your book?

One man’s patriot is another man’s zealot.

Thank you again for this interview! Do you have any final words?

I hope readers will like hanging out with Carson and will want to follow her adventures around the world. She’d like the company!

Two priceless paintings. Two million euros. A civil war. What could go wrong?

The DeWitt Agency assigned disgraced ex-cop Carson a simple job: carry two briefcases of cash to swap for two artworks stolen from a German museum. Except nothing’s simple in the Donbass, the breakaway Ukrainian region overrun by militias, warlords, and bandits.

After a brutal zrada – betrayal – Carson finds herself alone and hunted forty miles behind the front lines with half the money, one of the paintings, and a huge target hung on her back. The militia behind the exchange thinks she blew up their deal and wants the money and her hide. Her co-workers were in on the double-cross. And the Agency can’t send help into the hottest war in Europe.

Carson’s never been one to wait to be rescued. She hires Galina – a tough local with a harrowing past and a taste for revenge – to help her cut through every checkpoint, freelance army, crooked cop, and firefight between her and the West. But the road to safety is long and poorly paved. A vengeful militia commander, a Russian special-forces operator with an agenda, and her own ex-colleagues have Carson in their crosshairs.

Carson’s life is now worth less than a suitcase of money or paint on a plank…but if they want to take it from her, she’s going to make them pay.