Could Avanti Centrae become the publishing world’s Taylor Swift? Like the famous musician, Centrae got her rights back from a traditional publisher, and has since sold tens of thousands of books across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Italy, Germany, France, and Japan without the backing of a traditional Big Five publisher. Her thrillers, now published independently, have earned sixteen literary awards, Kindle Top 100 bestseller placements in the United States, Canada and Australia, and Barnes & Noble Nook recognition.
The commercial record is unusual for an independent author. The Lost Power, the first book in her VanOps series, reached the top 100 in the Amazon Kindle store in both the United States and Canada and hit number one in indie ebooks at Barnes & Noble. Solstice Shadows, the second VanOps novel, was a number one bestseller at Barnes & Noble and on Amazon in the US and Canada, and won both a Reader's Favorite Award and the Global Thrillers Grand Prize from Chanticleer. The Doomsday Medallion, the third in the series, was a number one bestseller at Barnes & Noble and reached the top 100 of the Nook store, while also hitting number one on Amazon in the US, Australia and Canada, reaching the top 100 in the Amazon Kindle stores of Australia and Canada, winning BestThrillers.com's award for Best Political Thriller and finishing as a Publisher's Weekly BookLife Prize quarterfinalist.
Centrae writes what she calls smart action and adventure, a sub-genre that combines intrigue, history, science and mystery. Her fiction places relics, codes and historical enigmas in collision with present-day espionage, science and global danger. The Lost Power, for example, centers on Alexander the Great's mysterious Egyptian weapon and the science behind it. Her working pitch is that a 2,000-year-old secret can become tomorrow's existential threat. The approach extends to craft. Many action thrillers prioritize external danger at the expense of interior life, she says, and her work tries to balance nonstop pursuit and twists with grief, fear, courage, and character growth.
Centrae brings an unusual background to the genre. She has traveled internationally, worked as a whitewater river guide, and spent a career as an IT executive. That combination gives her high-tech plots and global settings what she describes as unusual authenticity. Readers who love fast-paced thrillers that read like blockbuster movies make up her audience, along with fans of Dan Brown, Steve Berry, James Rollins, Clive Cussler, and David Baldacci. They are typically over 35 and include both men and women. For readers seeking smart action-and-adventure thrillers, the series offers a recognizable identity: ultra-black CIA operations confronting obscure, arcane threats.
That brand is expanding. The Picasso Job moves into art crime, moral justice, and high-society intrigue, and it won BestThrillers.com's Book of the Year award as well as Chanticleer's Global Thriller Grand Prize. Cleopatra's Vendetta took a gold medal in conspiracy thrillers from Readers' Favorite and first place in global thrillers from the Chanticleer International Book Awards. The range allows Centrae to work across espionage, technology, archaeology, art theft, and moral courage without repeating one concept. She also points to endorsements from major bestselling thriller authors, including James Rollins and Steve Berry, as part of a durable franchise built outside the traditional publishing launch system.
Centrae says she started writing to create exciting thrillers with emotional punch and powerful, thought-provoking themes. Among them: violence versus non-violence, emotional intelligence, forgiveness and redemption, dealing with death, and interconnectedness. She frames the stakes in psychological terms.
"Mankind's deepest anxiety is the fear of dying; thriller heroes routinely spit in the eye of Death, helping readers cope."
Avanti Centrae, #1 International Bestselling Thriller Author, is based in Grass Valley, California. Her books are available through major retailers in print, audio, and digital formats.