Many of us take in a viewing of the 1990 sci-fi action classic I Come in Peace as part of our Christmas celebrations, so it seems very fitting that this year’s holiday season has brought word that actor Matthias Hues, who played the villainous alien in that movie, has just released a new novel! It’s called Shadow Affairs, and it’s available for purchase on Amazon.
Background
A press release lets us know that before Shadow Affairs became a novel, it was meant to be a film. Here’s some background information on the project: “Actor and filmmaker Matthias Hues, known for more than four decades in Hollywood action cinema, traveled to Uzbekistan as a guest of an international film festival. Immersed in the country’s post–Cold War history and geopolitical reality, he wrote a CIA thriller screenplay on location. The project gained immediate traction. A major Uzbek bank expressed interest in financing the film, pending approval from the President’s daughter, a powerful cultural and political authority. After hearing Hues’s pitch, she agreed in principle and ordered an intelligence review. Despite strong interest, the intelligence services ultimately declined the project, judging the story too close to sensitive historical realities. The film was never made. Years later, free from political constraints, Hues returned to the material and rewrote it as a novel. The result is Shadow Affairs, a relentless CIA thriller shaped by lived experience, survival, and global geopolitics. What could not be told on screen became a story that had to be written and is now looked at by a major action director in Hollywood.“
Plot
Here’s what the book is about: When the CIA turns on its own, there is nowhere left to hide. Mark Anderson, a deniable operative, is erased after a mission goes wrong and disappears into the mountains of Central Asia. When a buried conspiracy resurfaces, he is forced back into a world of betrayals, fractured loyalties, and global power plays. Blending cinematic action with geopolitical realism, Shadow Affairs is a modern CIA thriller in the tradition of Jason Bourne and Jack Reacher—a story of survival, reckoning, and what happens when a weapon refuses to stay buried.
Here’s a description and excerpt from the Amazon listing:
The CIA created him. Then they tried to erase him.
Now he’s coming back.
Hunted by the system he served, Mark Anderson becomes something far more dangerous.Mark Anderson was the kind of operative the Agency swore didn’t exist — a ghost with muscle, instinct, and a kill record buried so deep it was never meant to surface. But when the people he served betray him, Anderson vanishes into the frozen mountains of Kyrgyzstan with nothing but a bloodied knife, his training, and the brutal will to survive.
Out there, wolves don’t run with him — they fear him.
— The room is quiet in the way of bad dreams. A man in a shirt too tight across the chest—Sergje—bends over a girl on the bed, fingers at her ankle, sliding a shoe off a foot that looks too small. A syringe rests on the nightstand, the needle catching the lamp’s light like a thin, cruel smile.
“Встань,” Anderson says evenly. Stand up.
Sergje turns. His eyes narrow as they try to fit this intruder into a category he understands. The girl moans, head turned away. A heavy shape rises up behind Anderson—a guard who had melted into the corner’s shadow. Thick arm snakes for a choke.
Anderson’s body answers without asking the mind. He drops weight, grips fabric, turns hips. The goon lifts off the ground and lands where the carpet buckles under his back. The move isn’t pretty. It is efficient—an old judo trick learned in a room that smelled of mats and sweat and long afternoons.
Sergje kicks the girl off the bed without looking at her. She tumbles, wig slipping, a streak of mascara on her cheek like a bruise drawn by a child. In the moment her face turns, Anderson sees the shape of memory underneath, the damage—the line of the jaw, the set of the mouth. Older. Emptier. Anna.
The recognition lands like a fist to the chest. He takes one step toward her, and that is when Sergje’s hand appears from under a pillow with a pistol that has lived there too long.
Anderson moves the way a man moves when he has counted this possibility three times already. There is no time to cross the room–
If you crave thrillers like Jack Reacher, Mitch Rapp, Jason Bourne, Tom Clancy, or Jack Carr, this will be your next obsession.
You must read this book — once you enter the shadows, there’s no going back.
Will you be picking up a copy of Matthias Hues’ novel Shadow Affairs? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
