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 is also 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 10 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 perspective, he brings to his fiction a rigorous command of institutions, human behavior, and the pathologies of power — grounded in scholarly discipline and in decades spent inside the rooms where that power is exercised.
He holds a Doctorate in Law and Policy, awarded with distinction, from Northeastern University. 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 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 mtvU, interviewing Tyler Perry and earning a Georgia Press Award for his interview with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.
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. Three continents. Nearly thirty years later, that story has become The Lucinda Protocol — deepened by Cold War service, sharpened by a career spent inside the institutions his fiction interrogates, and fully realized as the novel it was always meant to be.
Dr. Haynes divides his time between Rochester, New York, and Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Stephanie Watson-Haynes.
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