A New, Original and Electrifying Voice in the Literary Thriller
The Lucinda Protocol
From Washington to Berlin, from the mountains of Switzerland to the back roads of the Middle East, The Lucinda Protocol is a gripping international thriller about power, deception, and the deadly cost of truth.
When her magazine editor assigns her to investigate a classified Department of Defense dossier linked to high-ranking U.S. officials and foreign actors, Dr. Lucinda Robinson — former U.S. Army intelligence officer, clinical psychologist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist — goes to work.
Tracing a trail of stolen weapons, covert logistics networks, and weapons-grade uranium moving through the shadows of global systems, Lucinda uncovers an international conspiracy — a multinational syndicate reaching across governments, militaries, and continents, ruthless enough to eliminate anyone who gets too close.
At the same time, a predator is moving through Berlin — methodical, invisible, leaving a trail of murders with a signature no one can yet read. The thread connecting them leads to a place no one anticipated. What begins as two separate investigations converges into something apocalyptic — a reckoning that could reshape the balance of global power itself.
A U.S. Army Ranger-qualified intelligence officer and award-winning journalist, Lucinda knows that truth is never freely given and visibility can be weaponized. As a Black woman navigating institutions never designed with her in mind, she understands that the most dangerous thing she carries is not her weapon — it is what she knows.
Haunted by a buried past and driven by visions she has learned not to dismiss, she moves through this investigation with precision, purpose, and the quiet certainty of a woman who has already survived what should have stopped her.
And as she closes in on the story of her career, she unknowingly steps into the path of something far more immediate—and far more deadly.
Dr. Lucinda Robinson is a new, original, and electrifying voice in contemporary thriller fiction.
Industry Praise - 1998
“A strong plot that belts along with energy and lots of gruesome incidents … so many commercial ingredients.”
—Nick Webb
Former Editor & Managing Director
Simon & Schuster Books, London, England
View Nick Webb's original 1998 correspondence from Simon & Schuster London here.
About the Author
Dr. Lonie S. Haynes is a decorated U.S. Army veteran who served in West Germany during the height of the Cold War—an experience that continues to inform his work as a novelist exploring power, secrecy, and the hidden systems that shape global events.
A former Fortune 10 executive and inductee into Marquis Who's Who in America®, Dr. Haynes has held senior leadership roles at some of the nation's most prominent institutions, including Senior Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer at Rochester Regional Health, Global Senior Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer at AmerisourceBergen (Fortune 500 #8), and Vice President at Highmark Health.
A political scientist by training and a cultural and social anthropologist by perspective, he brings a deep understanding of culture, institutions, human behavior, and public and private policies — and the systems and pathologies that drive them — to his fiction, grounding it in both rigorous analysis and lived experience.
He holds a Doctorate in Law and Policy from Northeastern University, with distinction, and postgraduate degrees in management and public administration from Boston University and The City University of New York (CUNY), where he was a National Urban Fellow. And an undergraduate degree in political science from the State University of New York (SUNY). He has also served as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy.
His debut manuscript — then titled Silent Voices, written in 1998 and represented by the Michael Meller Literary Agency in Munich — earned early praise from editors at Simon & Schuster London, Doubleday New York, and Droemer Knaur Books, now part of the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group of Germany. Three major publishers. Three continents. Nearly thirty years later, that story has become The Lucinda Protocol — deepened by Cold War service, shaped by a career spent inside the very institutions his fiction examines, and fully realized as the novel it was always meant to be.
Dr. Haynes lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Stephanie.
The Lucinda Protocol is his debut novel.