I travel every opportunity I get, and my destinations often end up as settings in my novels. With Portrait of Deception, I did something different. For the first time, I made up an entire country, Tiranistan.
Why? Well, if you've read the novel, the dictator who runs Tiranistan is a particularly nasty guy, and he's planning a war against his neighbors. I didn't want to burden an actual country with the results of my imagination - not that there aren't shards of truth from many of the globe's evil regimes.