Andrew Klavan has a new novel coming, and readers got an early look this week when The Daily Wire published the complete prologue to Find Me Nowhere. The book is scheduled for release on October 27, 2026, from The Mysterious Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Pre-orders are being handled through the Daily Wire Shop.
The prologue introduces Specialist Jonah Henning, known to his fellow soldiers as Dooby, a Malibu piano player and surfer who enlisted almost on a whim and now finds himself in a combat convoy in a narrow gorge. Klavan opens with a memory that will not let his protagonist go: a woman standing against a mountain backdrop, her golden hair blown across her face, a Kevlar vest flattening the lines of her figure. The narrator calls her “transcendent,” even “holy” — a “girl-shaped portal” out of the war and back toward home.
That image arrives three weeks before the shooting starts, and it does something to Dooby that six months of deployment had not. It wakes him up. He begins asking himself where he is and what he is doing at war, the way a man might come conscious in a stranger’s room. Klavan sketches the life Dooby left behind with deliberate sensory detail: nights playing piano at Roland’s restaurant in Malibu, days riding the waves at Paradise and Dume, a house in the hills shared with anywhere from three to seven other men, and a stream of sun-kissed women whose names he sometimes could not recall the same night they appeared. High water, good dope, white smiles — that was the California version of a good life. It got old anyway.
War as the good life, and then not
What Klavan does in the prologue is invert the expected arc. Dooby does not hate the war, and he does not get off on killing. What he loves, the narrator explains, is disappearing — being “gone, gone, gone” while death surrounds him, a soul unaware of itself. For months, combat delivers exactly what surfing and sex and dope had stopped delivering. It is only when he sees the woman in the mountains that the trance breaks and the question lands: what the hell is he doing in this thing called war?
The answer, in the present tense of the scene, is that he is riding in the rear of the second MRAP in a four-vehicle convoy, grinding along a path the unit patrols often. Gray sky above, scrubby rock on the left, a sheer drop into a deep muddy gorge on the right. Command has received intelligence that “scarabs” — the unit’s nickname for this season’s insurgents, borrowed from a monster movie’s flesh-eating beetles — are gathering near the village of Ibram Kalay.
Beside him is his best friend, Corporal Geoffrey Tubman, called Tubs, working the remote weapon station on the .50 caliber overhead. Klavan lingers on the video-game quality of modern remote combat: a screen and a joystick, a gun that chatters out of sight, and enemies who simply droop and flutter to the ground, “quietly transformed from a potential threat into a pile of laundry.” Up front are Sergeant Go-Go at the wheel and Lieutenant Fred Manning, a New Yorker nicknamed Eli after the old Giants quarterback, riding shotgun.
Dooby scans the far wall of the gorge for snipers while his mind drifts back to the woman. He imagines her opening her arms, hears her whisper, and imagines that if he could reach her, he would emerge on Roland’s patio above the Malibu breakers with a margarita in hand. Then the road shakes. A mine or an IED has detonated up front, and a second thump follows — possibly a mortar. The convoy halts, Tubman fires, and the gorge fills with tracer rounds and rocket flashes.
The ambush in the gorge
Klavan’s prose turns clipped and disorienting as the firefight escalates. Dooby’s heartbeat drowns out the blasts. Eli shouts into the sat-com; Go-Go calls forward air; the radio dissolves into static and overlapping voices. Then the .50 above him goes quiet. Dooby watches Tubman, without explanation, snap up his M4 Shorty and tumble out of the vehicle “like jumping from a plane.”
The moment tears “jaggedly like paper,” and suddenly Dooby is prone in the dust between the vehicles with a 249 machine gun in front of him, shooting a grenade-launcher-armed fighter through the knees, then pounding his body, then panning to kill a second man as the first falls. The air is heavy with the stutter of .50 calibers from the other MRAP. The prologue cuts off mid-sentence — a deliberate cliffhanger, or simply as far as The Daily Wire chose to excerpt.
Klavan is a prolific novelist and conservative commentator whose previous thrillers include the Cameron Winter series and The Homelanders young-adult books. Find Me Nowhere arrives October 27, 2026, and is available for pre-order now.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/read-the-prologue-to-andrew-klavans-upcoming-book-find-me-nowhere