William C. Barnwell

In the early eighties, Colin Smythe published Barnwell's first novel, The Blessing Papers, in England. Simon & Schuster bought the paperback rights and contracted him for three more in a series. His fifth novel, The Scheme-of-the-Month Club, was published in 2002. As mentioned above, American Heat, a mystery/​thriller, has recently appeared as a Kindle eBook, and is available on all other eReaders with the appropriate apps. The Dungeon Below Bling-Bling High, a YA novel, will soon also be in eBook form. All of Barnwell's current novels are available at, or can be ordered in bookstores or online. In addition, the Authors Guild’s Back-in-Print program has re-issued the first four novels.

Barnwell has been president of a software company, taught at the university level, and served at the college level as a writer-in-residence. He recently taught for a time at an inner-city high school.

Of the novels begun or recently finished, The Dungeon Below Bling-Bling High is a YA novel about problems and rewards in current inner-city high schools under the one-size for all burdens of High Expectations and Excellence. First, what is the horror in the basement of the school? And from dog fights to football, how do students concerned with so many other negative things in their lives proceed? The novel suggests among other things some possible answers. The novel concludes with a Glossary of the Top Ten 'Tudes for survival at Bling Bling High: A look at some attitudes that seemed to stay constant over time and through many students.

American Heat is a contemporary conspiracy thriller. A dirty nuclear bomb is found planted in the IMF Headquarters in Washington, DC, three blocks from the White House. It is thought that Iran is behind it, and international tensions rise. But it wasn't Iran. It was the Green Underground, a radical conservation group, and it had something else in mind anyway. The dirty bomb is a distraction. Can Berry Cane, the junior partner in an AI supercomputer company, prevent the GU from using one of his company’s own supercomputers as a trigger for detonating dirty bombs somewhere else? If he cannot, the consumer may kiss all of the oil on the Arabian Peninsula goodbye.

But for Cane, it becomes a dark labyrinth from ignorance to knowledge. Fate had already bound him to a dead sister who possessed a secret he discovered, ensnaring himself and a new girlfriend, a DHS agent, in a deep conservationist conspiracy that goes beyond US borders. It leads Cane—a man who must be true to the promises of his past--and his girlfriend, into the path of an unstoppable, very angry re-incarnation of a man who was a desert legend, Lawrence of Arabia no less, but who is now a sadistic idiot savant of killing working for the GU. From artificial-intelligence supercomputers to secrets buried since the early days of the founding of Saudi Arabia, the race is on to prevent loss of the world’s largest oil reserves in a single cataclysmic event. Cane and Lawrence battle at the end, cocooned in their own deserts, but only one of them can find his way out.


Barnwell's eighth novel is being serialized in eBook format. See above. Also in progress, his ninth novel, Off Base, is a PI noir thriller and draws on the experiences of a short period of time during the nineties when he observed, with a now deceased friend, how private investigators should not work. It contains a strong dose of the supernatural.


Please go to Works above to view further information about all the novels and how they may be bought. Let him know in Contact how you like them.