Otho Eskin

Otho Eskin is a graduate of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and The George Washington University Law School in Washington, DC, where he received a Juris Doctor law degree. After serving in the Army, he joined the United States Foreign Service. During a career of over twenty years, he was stationed in Washington, DC; Damascus, Syria; Bel-grade (then capital of Yugoslavia); Reykjavik, Iceland; and Berlin (at that time the capital of the German Democratic Republic—East Germany). He had special assignments to New York; Geneva, Switzerland; and Caracas, Venezuela.

He was vice chairman of the United States delegation to the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea. He participated in the negotiations on the International Space Station, served as the principal US negotiator on several international agreements on seabed mining, and served as a US representative to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

He speaks French, German, and Serbo-Croatian. He was a frequent speaker at conferences and testified before the US Congress.

Otho’s career in the Foreign Service helped prepare him for thriller writing. In several of his foreign assignments, he served in countries governed by hostile, sometimes unstable, regimes. While stationed in East Berlin during the Cold War, for example, the East German Intelligence Service (Stasi), operating on behalf of their Soviet masters, tried to target him as a spy. They listed him in a book entitled Who’s Who in CIA, suggesting that Otho was a US intelligence agent. He was not.

At another post, one of Otho’s casual contacts was ar¬rested, charged by the regime with espionage, and publicly executed by hanging in a public square. Otho observed this horrific event in person—and it haunts him to this day. It is a constant reminder that espionage and black operations, the source of thriller stories that entertain readers, have real-world life-and-death consequences.

On retirement from the Foreign Service, Otho took up writing plays and thriller novels. His first thriller, The Reflect¬ing Pool, introduced Marko Zorn, a maverick Washington, DC, homicide detective—dangerous and unpredictable, a bit louche, and a cynical troublemaker and hustler who refuses to play by other people’s rules but has a strong moral center.

Marko hates guns, preferring instead to use his wits to get out of trouble when threatened by his opponents.

Day of Wrath is Otho’s fifth thriller in the Marko Zorn series—beginning with The Reflecting Pool, followed by Head Shot, Firetrap and Black Sun Rising.

Otho’s plays have been produced in Washington, New York, London, and elsewhere in Europe.

Otho is married to writer Therese Keane, and they live in Maryland.