First Words:

Chapter One

The Station

  A year of shooting pictures in eastern Ukraine led Elena Gorbacheva to believe she had encountered every sort of person who goes to war. Their many types had swaggered across her photojournalist's viewfinder and into one Russian publication or another. They had emerged from across Russia and beyond and joined informal volunteer-fighter brigades pursuing Kremlin aims in the war that began in Ukraine in 2014. Some of these men were answering a call to history, others adventure or the chance to kill without earthly penalty. Some men preferred the war to the wife. Plenty of men in Russia were willing to wager their lives. As long as the experience would be diverting. 

  Gorbacheva commuted between the war in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region and her life in Moscow. She was in the Russian capital now and hurrying across it to a rendezvous. A contact had summoned her to meet a man who had arrived in Russia to join the war. The man was American, which Gorbachev found thrilling and bizarre, since she knew the problems his nationality would bring.

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These are the opening words of:

Lost Son: An American Family Trapped Inside The FBI's Secret Wars

by Brett Forrest

Little Brown and Co.

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

A young American lost in Russia. An FBI-cover up. A mystery leading from Washington to the heart of the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine. 

When Billy Reilly vanished, his parents embarked on a desperate search for answers. Was their son’s disappearance connected to his mysterious work for the FBI, or was it a personal quest gone wrong? Only when Wall Street Journal reporter Brett Forrest embarks on his own investigation does a picture emerge: of the FBI’s exploitation of US citizens through a secretive intelligence program, a young man’s lust for adventure within the world’s conflicts, and the costs of a rising clash between Moscow and Washington.

Sept. 11th roused Billy Reilly’s curiosity for religions, war, and the world and its people beyond his small town near Detroit. Online, Billy taught himself Arabic and Russian. His passions led him into jihadi Internet forums, attracting the interest of the FBI.

An amateur drawn into professional intelligence, Billy became a Confidential Human Source, one of thousands of civilians who assist FBI agents with investigative work, often at great hazard and with little recourse. When Russia stirred rebellion in Ukraine, Billy set out to make his mark.

In Russia, Billy’s communications dropped. His parents, frantic, asked the FBI for help but struggled to find answers. Grasping for clues, the Reilly family turned to Brett Forrest. Commencing a quest of his own, Forrest applied years’ worth of research, along with decades of extensive experience in Russia, illuminating the inner workings of the national-security machine that enmeshed Billy and his family, picking up the lost son’s trail.

A masterwork of reporting, composed like a thriller, blending political maneuvering and international espionage, Lost Son illustrates one man’s coming of age amid new global dangers.