Crimson Gate Books
Jun 1, 2026
Crimson Gate Books is pleased to announce the republication of two acclaimed novels in A.C. Frieden’s Jonathan Brooks thriller series.
Crimson Gate Books is pleased to announce the republication of two acclaimed novels in A.C. Frieden’s Jonathan Brooks thriller series: The Pyongyang Option and Dead in the Quarter. Previously published by Down & Out Books, both thrillers now join Crimson Gate Books, which will also republish the remaining Jonathan Brooks backlist and release Frieden’s forthcoming thrillers, Letter from Istanbul and The Chicago Juror.
The Pyongyang Option
Still recovering from the devastation Hurricane Katrina inflicted on his New Orleans law practice, attorney Jonathan Brooks travels to Ukraine to represent a client in a high-stakes technology deal. When a key participant disappears, Brooks begins investigating and uncovers a dangerous conspiracy involving cyberterrorism and North Korea. At the same time, Brooks’s journalist ex-wife, Linda, accepts an assignment inside Pyongyang, where a single misstep could have deadly consequences. Their separate paths soon converge in an international thriller spanning Ukraine, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, North Korea, and beyond.
Dead in the Quarter
A celebration on the New Orleans riverfront ends in tragedy when Jonathan Brooks’s colleague, Tod Rochon, is struck and killed by a speeding car in the French Quarter. At the funeral, a stranger slips Brooks a cryptic message: Don’t trust the forensics.
Brooks’s search for the truth draws him deep into the city’s criminal underworld, where inconsistencies surrounding the supposed accident point to a conspiracy involving buried secrets from the occupation of Iraq and a fiercely contested New Orleans mayoral race. As danger closes in, Brooks must protect his firm, the people closest to him, and perhaps the future of the city itself.
A Series Built on Firsthand Research
A.C. Frieden is known for conducting extensive on-site research and drawing on firsthand experience to bring authenticity to his international legal and espionage thrillers. His research for The Pyongyang Option included travel to North Korea and Ukraine, along with a visit to the Chernobyl nuclear complex and the abandoned city of Pripyat. Those journeys allowed him to capture not only the geography of the novel’s settings but also their atmosphere, isolation, political tensions, and sense of danger.
Frieden’s years in New Orleans, where he attended law school and gained firsthand legal experience, similarly shaped Dead in the Quarter. His familiarity with the city and its legal and political landscape gives the novel its gritty, knowing portrayal of the French Quarter—from its narrow streets and historic cemeteries to the hidden alliances, criminal currents, and political rivalries beneath its celebrated surface.
About A.C. Frieden
A.C. Frieden is an international thriller author whose Jonathan Brooks series follows a globe-trotting attorney drawn into legal conflicts, political conspiracies, and deadly international intrigue. His fiction is distinguished by authentic settings informed by research conducted in the locations where his stories unfold.
Beyond writing, Frieden is an attorney, private pilot, scuba instructor, second-degree Taekwondo black belt, and former Swiss Army sniper. He holds degrees in molecular biology and law and has traveled to more than eighty countries, experiences that provide rich material for his novels. He is a member of Mystery Writers of America and International Thriller Writers and has appeared at major crime-fiction events, including Bouchercon.
The Pyongyang Option and Dead in the Quarter are now available from Crimson Gate Books in paperback and ebook, with additional Jonathan Brooks thrillers returning soon. For more info, visit Crimson Gate Books.