Goodreads asked John Fenzel:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

John Fenzel The idea for THE STERLING FOREST came as I had a sequel for my first novel, THE LAZARUS COVENANT underway. I was walking on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, past one of the Senate office buildings, and I saw a very elderly man--who was walking his two pugs. The question I asked myself at the time was, "I'll be he's had an interesting life, but does anyone know his story?" Several years prior to that encounter, I commanded a 10th Special Forces Group company with six Special Forces A-Teams--and we were the very first U.S. units to deploy to the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. One day, after a meeting at the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense, I turned the corner and encountered a man whose face was entirely concave on one side. I asked my Lithuanian counterpart what had happened to him, and he told me, "The KGB did that to him. He was tortured continuously because he was a member of the resistance." Tons of research and on-site visits to the Baltics, Europe, and Russia followed, but those two initial encounters were the genesis of THE STERLING FOREST.

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