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Elusive
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 26 2026
Pages: 204
Weight: 0.56
Height: 0.51 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Dr. Dwayne Smaak studies irrigation. He writes papers about strawberries. He has, on paper, the most boring job in the U.S. State Department.
On paper.
What Dwayne actually does - when the CIA asks nicely, which they do more often than he'd like - is have quiet conversations with farmers in remote places where Westerners aren't supposed to be having quiet conversations. He passes information up the chain. He doesn't ask questions. He goes home alive.
That has always been the deal.
The deal ends in an Indonesian farmhouse at 3 a.m. when an American drone, acting on intel Dwayne was never read into, fires a missile through the roof.
He wakes up in a Jakarta hospital with a blown eardrum, an arm in a cast, and the strong suspicion that the porcelain toilet he was pinned under is the only reason he's not dead.
The man the missile was meant for is Al Jezari - a Somali-born terrorist who has been the most wanted ghost in three intelligence services for over a decade. No one has ever seen Al Jezari's face and lived to describe it.
Until Dwayne.
And Al Jezari does not leave witnesses.
From a hospital bed in Jakarta to the back alleys of Sandakan, from a stolen freighter slipping through the Singapore Straits to the lawless coves between Borneo and the Philippines, Dwayne is pulled into a chase he was never trained for, by people he can't tell apart, in a part of the world where every alliance has a price and every smile is hiding a knife.
Dwayne has an engineering degree, a sarcastic mouth, and an unexpected talent for not dying.
He's going to need all three.
What kind of thriller is this?The kind where the body count is real, the stakes are global, and the hero spends Chapter 1 pinned under a toilet wondering how a meeting about mushroom infestations got him drone-struck. ELUSIVE is what happens when you take Clive Cussler's globe-trotting, Daniel Silva's tradecraft, and Carl Hiaasen's wicked sense of humor - and set the whole thing in waters most thrillers never visit.
It is the international thriller you've been waiting for someone to write.
- 42 short chapters - read it in a weekend
- A standalone story - no cliffhanger, no series commitment
- Five countries. One face Al Jezari can't allow to keep breathing.
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