A New, Original and Electrifying Voice in the Literary Thriller
THE LUCINDA PROTOCOL
Dr. Lucinda Robinson, a clinical psychologist by training, is an award-winning journalist with RD Magazine and a former U.S. Army intelligence officer.
She has spent twenty years learning how people either hide the truth or outright lie — first as a highly decorated U.S. Army intelligence officer and clinical psychologist, and now as an investigative journalist. But the only thing she has never been able to explain fully is what she sees when she closes her eyes.
She is a woman carrying dark secrets; wrestling with a haunting, deeply painful history that leaves her mired in nightmares, visions, and self-interrogation. When her editor assigns her to uncover the link among a classified Pentagon intelligence report, high-ranking U.S. government officials, and organized foreign actors, she sets out to expose the truth.
But her quest thrusts her into a dangerous labyrinth of espionage, terror, and murder, dragging her back into a world she thought she'd escaped years earlier. What follows is an exhilarating race from New York to the halls of power in Washington through the fractured heart of Berlin, across the mountains of Switzerland, and along the sand-blown back roads of the Middle East.
And just as she prepares to break the story of her career — a chilling conspiracy that reaches further than she imagined — she crosses paths with a serial killer who has been watching her for years.
What she does not yet know is that the Pentagon intelligence report includes her name. Not as a reporter. Not as a witness. But as a procedure, written years ago by people who are still alive, and still watching to see whether what they designed is working.
The Lucinda Protocol explores what a nation will bury and what one woman will not.
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 and the third generation of his family to serve. He served in West Germany at the height of the Cold War, and later in the Georgia Army National Guard — experience that continues to inform his work as a novelist exploring power, secrecy, and the hidden systems that shape global events. His grandfather and great-uncles, his father, and four uncles all served before him, across the First and Second World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. The Army was not a subject he researched. It was the house he grew up in.
A former Fortune 100® executive and inductee into Marquis Who's Who in America®, he has held senior leadership positions 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, and Vice President at Highmark Health. A political scientist by training and an anthropologist by inclination, Dr. Haynes brings real-world experience and perspective to institutions, human behavior, and the pathologies that drive both, along with the scholarly inquiry and decades spent in the very rooms where inquiries and decisions are made.
He holds a Doctorate in Law and Policy from Northeastern University in Boston. His doctoral thesis examined the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, specifically Title II, Subtitle B, and its initiative to address health disparities. His additional research examined U.S. public policy, foreign affairs, geopolitics, U.S. constitutional law, and political sociology and psychology.
He also holds additional postgraduate degrees in management (MSc.) and public administration (M.P.A.) from Boston University and Baruch College at the City University of New York, respectively, where he was a National Urban Fellow. He earned his undergraduate degree in Political Science. He has lectured at several colleges and universities across the United States, including as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy.
In the early 2000s, he wrote as an independent film, music, and book critic for regional and national publications, including Atlanta’s Welcome Magazine. He interviewed former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and earned a Georgia Press Award for his interview with actor, producer, director, and philanthropist Tyler Perry.
His debut manuscript — then titled Silent Voices, written in 1998 and represented by the Michael Meller Literary Agency in Munich — drew early praise from editors at Simon & Schuster London, Doubleday New York, and Droemer Knaur, now part of Germany's Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. Three major publishers and three continents and nearly thirty years later, the story has evolved into The Lucinda Protocol, enhanced by his Cold War service and further validated by a career spent inside and around the very institutions his fiction examines. It is now fully realized as the novel it was always meant to be.
Dr. Haynes and his wife, Stephanie, divide their time between Rochester, New York, and Atlanta, Georgia. The Lucinda Protocol is his debut novel.
“Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.”
―James Baldwin