North Sea Target is Out
My new thriller, North Sea Target, is finally available. It’s the first book in The Nordic Protocols series, though I wrote it last – which probably says something about how my brain works.
Why Wind Energy?
We were in Esbjerg this winter, the Danish port city on the west coast. It’s grey, windy, and full of offshore industry. The harbour is stacked with turbine blades waiting to be shipped out – massive things, wrapped in protective sheeting, being loaded onto vessels bound for wind farms across the North Sea.
Standing there watching the loading crews, I kept thinking about the supply chain. Those blades might come from the UK. The generators from Denmark. The foundations from the Netherlands. All of it gets shipped hundreds of kilometres offshore and assembled by massive installation vessels in the middle of the North Sea.
Each component weighs tons. Costs hundreds of thousands of euros. And nobody on that installation ship can verify whether the certificates are genuine, whether the materials meet spec, or whether someone cut corners three countries back in the supply chain. You only find out when something breaks, maybe in a storm, two hundred kilometres from shore. That’s where the book started.
What Happens in the Story
A Danish engineer discovers dangerous flaws in wind turbine blades. When he reports them, he ends up dead. His widow doesn’t buy the official story. A German journalist gets leaked documents showing forged certificates and manipulated safety reports. He starts digging, and the trail leads from the Netherlands to Germany to a Belgian offshore entrepreneur with connections in Eastern Europe.
A British investigator is tracking illegal workers and smuggling operations. The cases connect. The conspiracy gets bigger. What looks like corporate fraud turns into geopolitical sabotage. Someone wants Europe’s green transition to collapse. And they’re willing to kill to make it happen.
Why I Wrote This
I wanted to write a thriller that takes the energy transition seriously – not as a political statement, but as a setting with real stakes. Wind energy is politically charged, economically massive, and technically vulnerable. That makes it perfect thriller material.
There’s also something interesting about writing a conspiracy where the “good guys” aren’t automatically right. The engineer who blows the whistle has a mortgage and a sick wife. The politician pushing wind energy is also lining his pockets. The investigator just wants to close the case and go home. So there are no superheroes and no simple answers, just people navigating a mess.
The Series
North Sea Target is Book 1, but you can start anywhere. Each thriller works on its own – different locations, different conspiracies, same core characters.
If you’ve already read Patagonian Target or Scandinavian Target, this one shows how journalist Erik Wiedner and biologist Amelia Thompson first met. If you haven’t read the others, no problem. Jump in here.
What to Expect
If you like Robert Harris or Ken Follett, you’ll recognize the approach here: multiple perspectives, political entanglements, and pacing that takes its time. There are no superheroes and no easy answers. The ending isn’t a clean resolution, because that’s not how these things work in reality. Some questions stay open. Some guilty parties get away with it.
It’s a thriller about offshore wind farms, forged certificates, Ukrainian workers, and European politics. Set in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark.
Available now on Apple Books, Google Play Books, Kobo and of course on Amazon as a Print-Book and a Kindle E-Book.
