William Clinkenbeard

O is for Oval, Oswald and Osama William Clinkenbeard

Davis Lane is a freelance theologian who listens to Country and Western music and likes single malt whisky. But there's not much call for his line of work in a secular world, until he is invited to an interview with a company that exports kilts, pipes and tartan to America. When he agrees to accept an assignment to review a book written by a Scottish preacher and diligently read by the President of the United States, it seems like a good thing. But things take a twist when Lane learns that he seems to be involved in a covert operation run by the CIA. What makes it worse is that other mysterious parties are seriously interested in what he is going to find in the book. As he labors to interpret the book and keep one step ahead of those who are determined to appropriate his insights one way or another, he finds himself in an ever-more confusing maze. Set in Edinburgh and Fife, O is for Oval, Oswald and Osama is a work of fiction wound carefully around actuality. The central character of this political-theological novel finds that "Truth in the twenty-first century was like an onion. You peeled off one layer after another, trying to get for the solid core of truth. Finally, the onion was gone, and there was nothing left."