A Spy in Saigon: A Kat Lawson Mystery
Mystery
4th in Series
Setting – Vietnam
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Level Best Books
Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 25, 2025
Paperback
Print length ‏ : ‎ 230 pages

Synopsis

The truth will set you free – or it will kill you.

Kat Lawson’s new undercover assignment has turned deadly. A trip to Vietnam to write a travel feature for Journey International while making a drop to deliver cash and passports for a top-secret operation has gone awry. Kat has a choice to make and a target on her back. She can live with a secret, or she can reveal a truth that puts her in the crosshairs of an enemy sworn to kill her. With the lives of trafficked children at stake in a country where agents and double agents trade secrets, Kat must choose between the acceptance of a truth that will forever change her life or living a lie that will save the lives of others.

Amazon

Guest Post

The Story Behind the Story

Good afternoon.  My name is Nancy Cole Silverman, and I’m the author of A Spy in Saigon, a Kat Lawson mystery about a travel reporter working undercover while on assignment in Vietnam.

As a writer, I know that for every book, there’s a story behind the story. Sometimes that story is personal, or a scene or event that lives in the writer’s mind waiting for the right time to appear on the page as part of a bigger story.  Such is the case for A Spy in Saigon.

I came of age during the Vietnam War. Many of the boys in my high school graduating class were drafted, while others sought deferment to attend college, only to be drafted out of university for poor grades. The war touched us all. For the first time, the nightly news carried coverage of the carnage, fueling debates that spilled into the streets in mass demonstrations. One was either for war or against war.

I felt as though I had been drafted into the middle of it.  I had married my college sweetheart. Back then, girls married young. It wasn’t unusual for a young woman to get her BS or BA and her MRS. at the same time. In fact, it was almost expected. My ex had joined ROTC, which meant he wouldn’t be drafted, but he would be inducted into the US Air Force upon graduation.

Once married, my ex was off to his first overseas assignment, and I started meeting other young women whose husbands were also overseas on isolated assignments or assigned to Vietnam. I became a member of what was then called The Waiting Wives.  Wives who could no longer live on base, because their husbands were no longer attached to a stateside base. For this reason, many wives moved off base but stayed close enough to take advantage of the commissary, doctors, and the Waiting Wives, who provided friendship and support for one another. This was a time when women couldn’t get a credit card in their own name, buy a house, sign a lease agreement, or do anything beyond buying groceries, and needed their husband’s power of attorney to do anything.

I never forgot those days back in the late 60s and 70s, or the protests that tore this country apart, and I’ll admit when I sat down to write book four in the Kat Lawson series that Vietnam wasn’t my first choice. I struggled with the idea.  Would my readers want to go there? But the harder I tried not to place Kat in Vietnam, the more she appeared every morning on the blank page—the image of her wearing a straw conical hat, riding on the back of a moped, dodging traffic, and visiting ancient temples. News stories about Vietnam’s commercial development and restaurants where my friends wanted to meet for lunch kept popping up. Everything—from travel to food pulled me like a magnet to its opposite pole. I wrestled with how to include Kat in the dark underworld of Vietnam, with agents and double agents. I experimented with how to tell this story. I was rife with conflict about the war and my own past. I had more questions than answers and no pat solutions. But that’s when it hit me. If I were driven by conflict, so would Kat, and therein lies the gift.

I believe that when a writer taps into a character’s internal conflict and surrounds them with situations that challenge them physically and emotionally, readers connect with them on a very emotional level.

My research became rabbit holes that worked themselves into the storyline with ease, and when I finished the book, I knew it was the one I was meant to write.  I hope you enjoy it.

–Nancy Cole Silverman

About the Author

After 25 years in news and talk radio, Nancy Cole Silverman retired to write fiction. Her crime-focused novels have attracted readers throughout America, and her short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies. Silverman writes the Carol Childs and Misty Dawn Mysteries (Henry Press) and the Kat Lawson Mysteries (Level Best Books).

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