A former corporate president with degrees in chemical and nuclear engineering has channeled decades of technical expertise and government experiences into a growing series of mystery thriller novels that blend authentic Cold War-era intrigue with contemporary espionage scenarios.
W. Michael Hewitt spent his career working with senior government officials in Washington, DC and at US Department of Energy weapons sites across the country before retiring to Arizona. Rather than leaving his professional experiences behind, he transformed them into the foundation for two distinct thriller series that have attracted readers seeking technically accurate fiction grounded in real locations and plausible scenarios.
His first three novels center on Dr. Essie Openwaters, a protagonist whose academic credentials mirror the technical sophistication that defines Hewitt’s work. The character possesses dual doctoral degrees in Chemical Engineering and Earth Sciences from Stanford University, providing a believable framework for the high-stakes scientific mysteries she confronts.
In the debut novel, Girl Emerging, readers follow twenty-one-year-old Essie as she embarks on a thousand-mile road trip to begin work as a research scientist at a prestigious national laboratory in Richland, Washington. The journey becomes a deadly cat-and-mouse game when Griff Duncan, a serial rapist murderer, fixates on her as his next victim. The novel establishes Essie’s character while introducing the national laboratory setting that becomes central to the series.
The second installment, Malicious Deception, escalates the technical complexity when Essie discovers a fifty-year-old letter concealed within a surplus US Atomic Energy Commission desk she was refinishing. Her investigation into whether the nuclear time bomb referenced in the letter represents a genuine threat draws the attention of Ty Rettig, a psychopathic billionaire bureaucrat desperate to prevent his treason from being exposed. Essie must navigate assassination attempts while pursuing the truth behind decades-old secrets.
The third Openwaters novel, 90 Days, shifts the threat to a contemporary terrorism scenario. Essie joins forces with a high-powered secret government task force to identify and stop an unknown terrorist planning to deploy dual electromagnetic pulse bombs across the western United States. The attacks threaten tens of millions of lives, raising the stakes to national security levels.
Hewitt’s second series represents a departure into historical fiction while maintaining the technical authenticity that characterizes his writing. Set during the 1960s at the height of the Cold War, these thrillers feature Rocco Mancuso, a thirty-four-year-old US Atomic Energy Commission investigator recognized as the agency’s top atomic spy catcher despite being trapped in a dead-end job by a hostile superior bent on wrecking Mancuso’s life and career.
The opening volume, MANCUSO, Dark Secrets Rising, thrusts the protagonist into a Soviet conspiracy aimed at eliminating plutonium production at the Atomic Energy Commission’s Hanford Works near Richland, Washington. While attempting to rebuild his personal life after his wife’s walked out and took up with one of his former law school colleagues, Mancuso becomes the target of foreign assassins. The investigation leads him to a plot involving suitcase nuclear devices positioned to destroy a massive dam, threatening millions of lives and crippling the US nuclear weapons program.
The second Mancuso thriller, MANCUSO: Termination Wind, explores corruption within American institutions as Mancuso’s boss intentionally places him in conflict with a wealthy, well-connected psychopath. The investigator discovers a conspiracy extending into the highest levels of power, far beyond typical Cold War espionage. The same antagonist from the Openwaters series, Tyrone Rettig, emerges fifty years earlier as a formidable adversary willing to eliminate anyone approaching the truth. Mancuso faces difficult choices about personal sacrifice while attempting to expose corruption that could alter the Cold War’s balance of power.
A third Mancuso installment, MANCUSO: Credible Lies, is currently in development.
The novels target avid thriller readers aged thirty to sixty with college educations, an audience likely to appreciate the technical accuracy and historical authenticity that distinguish Hewitt’s fiction writing from conventional thriller fare. His engineering background and experience at nuclear facilities provide credibility to scenarios that might otherwise strain believability.
The recurring Richland, Washington setting and Hanford Works location ground both series in real geography familiar to anyone knowledgeable about the American nuclear weapons program. By anchoring fictional narratives to actual locations and technical realities, the mystery thriller author creates believable characters navigating plausible threats rather than relying on fantastical scenarios divorced from technical possibility.
This approach reflects Hewitt’s unusual career trajectory from corporate leadership in highly technical fields to fiction writing, demonstrating how specialized professional knowledge can enrich genre fiction when authors possess both storytelling ability and subject matter expertise.
