John Fenzel

About me:

John Fenzel is a senior Army Special Forces officer who has served on our nation’s battlefields throughout Europe and the Middle East. He has served as a military assistant on the personal staff of the Secretary of Defense, as a Special Assistant to the Vice President, and as a White House Fellow during the Clinton and Bush administrations. He commanded the Special Forces Training Battalion at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In the wake of the September 11th attacks, he served as Staff Director for Tom Ridge in the Homeland Security Council. He was the principal architect of The Homeland Security Advisory System, our nation’s color-coded alert system. In his 25 years of military service, John has served in numerous command and staff positions around the world. During Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, he commanded a Special Forces “A-Team,” training, equipping and advising a Kuwaiti Battalion and accompanying them during the liberation of Kuwait. He has commanded three Special Forces companies, leading the first Army deployments to Pakistan and the Baltic States. In Bosnia, he commanded the special operations teams in the U.S. and British sectors, working closely with the United Nations to secure the indictments and convictions of those responsible for war crimes in Srebrenica. He is the only active duty American military officer to testify at The Hague in support of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). John is a graduate of the Naval War College and the National War College. Born and raised in Chicago, John lives with his wife and three children at Fort Knox, Kentucky where he commands an Army brigade. The Lazarus Covenant is his first novel.

Praise for THE LAZARUS COVENANT

With the sure hand of one who has labored round the clock in the basement of the West Wing as crises have unfolded in post Cold War capitals, and as a writer who combines a scholar's understanding of the ageless hatreds that afflict and inflame Balkan passions...with rare eloquence in prose, John Fenzel has created an absorbing thriller that is enlivened by bone-chilling plausibility and relevance to contemporary challenges. I couldn't put it down. Read it now and look for it soon in your neighborhood theaters!
—Robert McFarlane, National Security Advisor to Ronald Reagan

If John le Carre were to visit the Balkans, this is the kind of thriller he would produce. Fenzel probes the dark secrets of one of Europe's most intriguing places--Bosnia--bringing its tortured history to life while crafting an even more disturbing story involving ruthless terrorists, loose nukes, and a team of secret operatives racing to prevent disaster. And this author is no armchair commando. Fenzel, a special operations officer in the U.S. Army, has generated fascinating prose that can only come from someone who has seen the intel, belly-crawled across unknown battlefields, and helped manage crises in the West Wing. The Lazarus Covenant explores a secretive world with rare verisimilitude, while deftly plumbing some questions of good and evil.
—Rick Newman, Senior Writer, U.S.News & World Report

No publisher will give me the column inches I need to comment on this novel. To say I enjoyed it and turned the pages furiously is an understatement. I was totally absorbed in this compelling and exciting work. John Fenzel’s military experiences, his sense of history and place, and the blend of characters and conflict make this a truly suspenseful, impressive and easy read.
—Tom Ridge, Former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security

The Lazarus Covenant races along the razor edge of a darkly dangerous precipice—a compelling story written by an author whose real life traced that same razor edge.” —Robert Andrews, A Murder of Justice (G.P. Putnam)


From the White House Situation Room to the treacherous terrain of Sarajevo, John Fenzel, who knows both worlds intimately, takes readers on a gripping adventure. Suspenseful, well-written, and often terrifying, The Lazarus Covenant brilliantly translates into fiction the ongoing struggle to stop the most dangerous weapons from falling into the hands of the world’s most dangerous people. A riveting read. A true page-turner. I can’t wait to see the movie!
—Judith Miller, FOX Commentator, Journalist and Author, Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War

The Lazarus Covenant weaves the haunting history of the Balkan wars with a contemporary tale of nuclear terrorists on the loose, all the while catapulting the reader through the hairpin turns of its suspenseful plot. Each of Covenant’s many unexpected revelations unveils another layer of intrigue and draws us closer to the intrepid Mark Lyons and the villains he must identify and stop before it’s too late. John Fenzel masterfully combines key elements—grisly Balkan history, the specter of nuclear terrorism, and a compelling level of operational detail—to give his story a gripping, even unsettling, realism. This novel will reward both veterans and newcomers to these issues with a page-turning adventure not to be missed. I'll look for it on the bestseller lists....
—Max Boot, Foreign-Affairs Columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, Author of War Made New (Gotham Books, 2006)

You cannot write an intriguing, edge of your seat book like this unless you are grounded from experience in actual operations. Colonel John Fenzel has the training and real world experience in the Balkans and with special operating units to bring this story to life.
—Brigadier General (USA, Ret.) David Grange, CNN Military Analyst

In a book infused with history, John Fenzel blends riveting intrigue with multi-layered plots. I found myself caught in a spider's web of suspense that only grew with each chapter. Set in Bosnia in 2007, the narrative unfolds as terrorists plot nuclear Armageddon cunningly using centuries of ethnic and religious conflict to mask their moves. The battlefield stretches from small villages in the Balkans to the White House and the Persian Gulf. Fenzel's extensive field experience with special operations and his intimate knowledge of the inner corridors of power in Washington D.C. infuse The Lazarus Covenant with vivid imagery and a deep-rooted sense of reality that will leave you wondering where art ends and reality begins.
—Donatella Lorch, Director, Knight International Press Fellowships, International Center for Journalists

Colonel John Fenzel's experiences on the front lines of the global war on terror make The Lazarus Covenant an incredibly gripping and compelling read; that he is an equally masterful storyteller also makes this page-turner first-rate entertainment. While the current publishing field is crowded with wanna-be commandos, very few of them have ever been in the weeds, calling an air strike, surviving in a shifting world of intentions and misdirections, where survival is matter of smarts as well as brawn. If you want to know the news behind the news, and to see first-hand the drama of "the human heart in conflict with itself," read Fenzel. Period. His writing career is filled with nothing but promise. The Lazarus Covenant is just the beginning, and it is a superb one.
—Doug Stanton, In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors (Owl Books)

Colonel Fenzel's The Lazarus Covenant is an engrossing adventure story that puts believable men and women in the vortex of Balkan politics. It is a remarkably well-written novel with a graceful style, rich detail, and characters who are entirely believable and whose destinies are of compelling interest. While other authors gather material for their stories in libraries, this book is clearly based on the author's extensive experience inside American Special Forces and on the ground in the Balkans. Only a Green Beret could write such a detailed, convincing, and culturally sensitive novel where the reader is never quite sure how much is fiction and how much is fact. An excellent story told in an excellent way.
—Hans Halberstadt, Roughneck Nine One, War Stories of The Green Berets, U.S. Navy Seals In Action, Green Berets -- Unconventional Warriors Under Cover

Riveting! Relentless, brilliantly nuanced, and vividly detailed. Told with an insider’s view of one of the world's flashpoints and the horrors of war, The Lazarus Covenant plunges us headlong into tomorrow's headlines.
—Dick Couch, Sheriff of Ramadi

John Fenzel has witnessed first hand the triumph and tragedy of life in the Balkans. He has used that experience, and his expert knowledge of the inner workings of government, to produce a brilliant debut novel. Rich in detail and brimming with suspense, The Lazarus Covenant paints a chilling picture of how the passions of the Balkans could ignite yet another round of conflict....only this time with global consequences.
—Roger Cressey, Former White House Counterterrorism Director and NBC News Terrorism Analyst

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