The Infidels — Hank Turowski

In 1994, while I was living and working in a desert oil camp in eastern Saudi Arabia, I wrote the beginnings of “The Infidels”. I returned to Arabia in 2012 to work on a gold mine site in western Arabia. Between my first and second visits, the world had changed significantly, but Arabia stayed the same. I put the original book through several excruciating rounds of critique and edit. Each one strengthened the story. As a result, the plot has expanded and the characters have strengthened, and what began as a single idea has expanded into a 4-book series. As I have come to discover, Arabia is the nexus of all that is happening in the world today. We may think we in the West are important; but Arabia controls all our futures. "Infidels" and its follow-on novels, "Jihad", "Harb, and "The Angel of Mercy", tell the story of an American Engineer, Kevin O'Reilly, who must confront the dangerous realities of being a Westerner living and working in a muslim culture. The novel "Infidels" explores the consequences of greed and corruption on the western employees of a major oil company, and how a social misstep or a cultural misunderstanding can result in a potential death sentence.