A story can be driven by character, by circumstance or both. FBN, squarely fits in the latter category. The circumstance is the Southeast Asian heroin trade. FBN gives us a hint of a history rooted in the Vietnam War; of CIA agents turned lose to ply the skills of their trade for self-interest rather than national interests; of southeast Asian warlords having discovered the machinery of modern warfare, freed to apply those machines to the new art of building drug empires. From this cauldron of defeated men brutally mixed with the grandiose dreams of truly little men comes true evil.
It is in conjuring this murky atmosphere between the forces of good and evil, between right and wrong that FBN is at its best. The division is not a demarcation line but, as in real life, a twilight zone. From the shadows emerges the antagonist, from the light the protagonist. Their drama is played out in the conscience of the reader. FBN draws the reader into the struggle by telling what happens.
Carl Lamoreaux, former CIA agent turned heroin smuggler, is the personification of evil. His evil stems not from his product but his method. His perception of the world is of three entities: himself, everybody else and agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics who would arrest him if they could. He collects around him an organization of henchmen whose view of the world is only slightly different than his own--with themselves first. It is this self-centered, adventurism that drives the evil, that leads to the death of two FBN agents, that leads to the rise of the nemesis of evil.
John English is a narcotics agent. Like Lamoreaux, English has a Vietnam War past. The difference is that at some point, perhaps even before the common experience of war, the motive force of one was directed toward veneration of self and the other toward attempting to accept his place in society. But there is an unidentified something else coursing through the pages of FBN that charges the story with a surrealistic struggle between good and evil.
That something could be the stark contrast not only between good and evil, but of bulging bureaucracy and individual will; of congested cities like Bangkok and Los Angeles (where parts of the story are played out) and the open sea and desert. In using these backdrops,