Alex Cawley came to thrillers by an unlikely route. He spent four years practising law in Communist China before returning to London to retrain as a software engineer, and now works as a startup CTO. His taste for dangerous places came earlier, and firsthand: an expedition across Chad to Emi Koussi, an extinct supervolcano deep in the Sahara, left him fascinated by the world’s most remote and contested corners.

Bolivia he knows far more intimately. Married into a Bolivian family, he has travelled the country for the better part of a decade, and has followed its upheavals with the ache of someone who loves its people and their future. That collision of extraordinary landscapes, ordinary lives, and the powerful interests circling both is the ground his fiction is built on. Rare Earth is his debut, the first in a series following Tom Hart.