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This election season’s clincher.

The first anti-Iran-war novel.

Iraq was only a prelude to the horrors of an eventual war with Iran.

A coalition of aching-for-Armageddon televangelists, big oil, and false prophets of democracy manipulate maverick, straight-talking Senator-become-President-in ‘08, Jim Whitman into aerial strikes against Tehran. This is a confrontation he knows the United States must avoid by all means. Yet the spirits he has cited and pandered to on his road to the White House no longer follow his command. When the cakewalk into Iran becomes a gauntlet, the Vietnam veteran-turned-dove-by-conscience is soon decried as a reckless warmonger by the public and besieged in the West Wing by cut-and-run protesters while the American Empire stumbles over the abyss into a military quagmire, economic depression and possible nuclear war.

Meanwhile, three student-days friends and former lovers find themselves propelled by fate to the top of their country’s delegation negotiating the future of the Middle East. Seran, a Kurdish refugee raised in America, made his career in the oil business, yet behind the scenes works for an independent Kurdish state. From the moment she discovered her father had collaborated with the CIA in dictatorial Greece, diplomat Elia’s life and thinking is subordinated to her pathological hatred of America and severing her beloved Europe from her self-defeating ties to the United States. Bryan, a moderate Democrat, sees his patriotism and religious beliefs betrayed by the Bush Administration’s abuse of 9/11 and pledges to never let Whitman produce a similar duplicity.

President Whitman has tied all his hopes for America’s viability in the Persian Gulf and his personal legacy to these political talks. Negotiations in which deception is standard operating procedure, abusing another’s love and ideology for your own ends becomes mandatory, alliances and disguises shift like dancers at a masked ball choreographed by Machiavelli, and on whose outcome the survival of millions depend.

About the author

Hannes Artens, from Vienna, Austria, studied history and political science while operating a travel agency in Namibia and counseling indigenous Himba tribes on ecological tourism. After graduating with a Master’s degree in International Conflict Analysis and a special education in negotiation and mediation techniques, he was associated with the Carter Center in Atlanta and a Hamburg based, academic think tank advising the German Parliament on U.S. foreign policy. The Writing on the Wall is his debut novel.

Visit the author’s website and debate his novel with him live on Hannes Artens’ blog.