Tony Freyer’s Double Agents Takes a Spy Family to Remote Australia and Mexico

Espionage comes to the U.S.-Mexico border and Northern Australia, and a family of intense and fiercely loyal Americans get caught up in the intrigue.

By 2008, a global cocaine cartel is expanding aggressively. In remote Arnhem Land of northern Australia, ocean vessels, trucks, and vans move the cocaine to urban markets—and the cartel uses hidden tunnels to deliver it across the California-Mexico border. The cartel’s planes, sea vessels, trucks, and drones counter U.S., Mexican, and Australian law enforcement’s own technologies. But the Iraq War has disrupted transnational law-enforcement’s cooperation.

In 2009, the new Obama Administration seeks renewed transnational law-enforcement cooperation against the cocaine cartel. Rep. Sarah Donaldson’s congressional intelligence committee funds an undercover operation. She turns to old friends: the Berneray family of spies. The Berneray mother, Diana, and Donaldson were covert anti-Vietnam War activists. Diana now has clandestine intelligence sources in Arnhem Land, particularly Malangi, an Aboriginal Law Man who commands bush-country spirits. Her daughter Ann runs secret drone operations. Tom, the son, is Donaldson’s field agent in Arnhem Land and on the U.S.-Mexico border. And the father, Vietnam veteran Jim, has experience in all these places. But Jim mysteriously disappears in Arnhem Land.

Facing discovery and betrayal, the Berneray family perceives Tom’s old adversary, CIA agent Albert Jennings, is behind the attacks. They confront the grim truth that everyone—including family themselves—can be double agents.

A new novel from emeritus professor of law and history Tony Freyer of the University of Alabama.