Literary Las Vegas: K. Ray Katz

Henderson author K. Ray Katz’s novel “My Enemy’s Enemy” spins a scenario packed with action from a terrorist attack on the Winter Olympics in Russia and Chinese uranium going to Iran to South Korea invading the North. At the center is Skurt Ancre, a provincial energy minister, who steps in behind the scenes to prevent disaster.

Excerpt:

Skurt Ancre rarely lost his temper. At first glance he seemed to be a mild mannered civil servant barely smart enough to hold onto his job although, he was anything but. Hidden behind the round ruddy complexioned face inherited from his Yakutsk native mother and black hair and gray eyes, from his White Russian father was a person who had quickly learned how to become a man of many talents.

A few years earlier the ineptness of bureaucrats trying to make the Russian top-down driven nation into a market driven economy had almost caused the collapse of its financial institutions. No one was being paid and industrial production had come to a standstill. Into this mess stepped Skurt Ancre, a man with an idea of how to restart the economy of Chukotka. During the day he worked as a provincial government Minister while at night he worked to create an organization that seemed as implausible as it was successful. To the general public he was the Energy Minister of Chukotka. To the Prime Minister and President of Russia he was the man who had backed them into a corner and given his province unheard of independence from Moscow. To his associates he was the man who stole Russian oil by the ship load to finance the establishment of an auto assembly plant in Anadyr providing paying jobs when Russia had been on the verge of financial ruin.