"The Paine Protocol has everything audiences love: intrigue, heart, and a powerful emotional core. This has all the elements of a major motion picture."
- Ron Hall, New York Times bestselling author of Same Kind of Different as Me, adapted into a Paramount Pictures motion picture
Some secrets don't stay buried.
When five-year-old Mark Paine Fisher lost his father, Captain Robert T. Paine, USAF, in a 1966 plane crash in West Texas, he was told it was a tragedy.
A small aircraft.
A training flight.
A young father who never came home.
For decades, that was the story.
But grief has a way of leaving clues.
Nearly sixty years later, family silence, missing records, and unanswered questions pull Mark into a Cold War mystery he was never supposed to uncover.
But the search began in another kind of pain.
After ending his 37-year marriage, Mark began confronting a difficult truth: he had survived losing his father at five, but surviving the loss was not the same as processing it.
His father's death had cast a long shadow across his life, shaping how he loved, connected, and showed up in the relationships that mattered most.
What began as an investigation into his father's mysterious death became something far more personal.
Searching for what happened to his father became inseparable from understanding what had happened inside the son he left behind.
Through classified files, imagination, buried government secrets, aviation mystery, imagination, and the act of putting decades of grief into words, Mark discovered that sometimes the truth we are searching for is not only buried in the past.
It is buried within us.
Blending fact, fiction, imagination, and suspense, The Paine Protocol is a gripping Cold War thriller based on a true story about fathers and sons, unfinished love, family legacy, faith, grief, and one haunting question:
What really happened?
Because sometimes the deepest mystery is not only what happened to the father.
It is what happened inside the son.
The Paine Protocol is for readers who love political and historical thrillers, Cold War intrigue, aviation mysteries, government secrets, real family history, and stories of grief, loss, legacy, and unanswered questions.
Some truths are worth the cost of finding them.
For an even more personal experience, listen to the author-narrated audiobook and hear the son tell his father's story in his own voice.