When I first put pen to paper to write ‘To Steal a Sea’ I wanted to do something different in terms of genre: I wanted to write a thriller set in the legal world but which was also high finance conspiracy fiction, drawing upon my previous working experience in the international bond markets. The tricky part was positioning the book between these two separate worlds: the world of international banks and oil markets on the one hand, and the world of the courtroom on the other. At the heart of the book is a war crime, based upon historical fact, committed in an East German village in the closing days of the Second World War. One of the principal characters, the Russian oil billionaire Petr Damyanovitch, was the ‘teenage assassin’ guilty of the atrocity, and who has been haunted by guilt for it ever since. It is his rage with the new world which replaced the certainties of the Cold War era which drives him to conspire with Islamic extremists, oil tycoons, and a high-ranking US politician to destroy the new nations on Russia’s borders and to ‘steal a sea’ or more specifically, its oil rights.
Only three men stand in the way of the conspiracy but each is flawed by personal history and private fears. It is the clash between these two groups of opponents which provides one of the principal themes of the book, set against a backdrop of dynamic oil exploration and trading, frenzied money markets, political intrigue and a succession of assassinations of anyone and everyone posing a threat to a painstakingly designed conspiracy. But the book is equally about relationships between friends, enemies, lovers, and fathers and daughters; after all, human emotions always transcend the impersonal, cold worlds of finance and high crimes. The quest for justice also forms a core theme of the book: justice for victims of a crime but also for the principal witness to it. I hope that this book bridges the two worlds identified at the beginning of this summary, and that readers will appreciate the thrill and excitement of lawful markets used for wholly unlawful purposes, and the horror of a conspiracy driven by one man’s guilt for an unforgivable crime.