A COUP?
IN THE UNITED STATES?

A prominent citizen in Washington, D.C., agonizes over the precarious condition of the country he loves. Cynical, irresponsible leaders aggravate dangerous problems. He seizes an unexpected, daunting opportunity to act and is drawn into harrowing circumstances. His wife worries about his stressed condition, but does not know its cause. Suddenly, she finds herself in the middle of a nightmare of her own. The novel tells a story of secret political machinations and of a traumatic police investigation. It keeps tightening its grip on the reader. The milieus are Washington, D.C., Paris and environs, and Charleston, South Carolina.

Though intensely suspenseful, this is no ordinary thriller. It is an absorbing moral drama with an epic dimension and forms a trenchant commentary on the state of America and the Western world. A DESPERATE MAN has been compared to the fiction of George Santayana, Thomas Mann, and Gore Vidal, as well as to Whittaker Chambers’s autobiographical classic, Witness.

CLAES G. RYN was born and raised in Sweden, but has lived for most of his adult life in Washington, D.C., where he is Professor of Politics at the Catholic University of America. He is Honorary Professor at Beijing Normal University and gave the Distinguished Foreign Scholar Lectures at Peking University in 2000.

ISBN 978-0-9887508-2-1 • Paperback 672 pages $24.95
ISBN 978-0-9887508-0-7 • Hardcover 672 pages $42.00
ISBN 978-0-9887508-1-4 • Ebook, Amazon $9.99