Geoffrey Raymond

Dateline: The White House. A beautiful Russian spy is sleeping with Donald Trump. Nothing new there, except that this time she’s doing so with the joint approval of American and Russian intelligence … and the enthusiastic blessing of the First Lady. Her name is Isobel Russe – Bela to her friends. Armed with a wicked sense of humor, an office in the West Wing and a really big gun, she may be the most dangerous woman in the Western Hemisphere. Author and painter Geoffrey Raymond is celebrating the 4th of July by releasing the first two “Acts” in a series of novellas and short stories titled “The Hunt for Red November – A Tragedy in Many Acts.” Dark, political satire. Belly-laugh, out-loud funny. Imagine the demon spawn of P.G. Wodehouse and Quentin Tarantino, with Carrie Bradshaw swanning by, dressed to the nines, Cosmopolitan in hand. Raymond is best known for his portraits of the movers and shakers of Washington and Wall Street, and has been featured on The Today Show, NBC Evening News, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and countless other media outlets. "Being an artist means going where your mind takes you. Sometimes that means painting; other times it means writing," Raymond explains. "And ever since painting Donald Trump back in 2016, and then watching his Presidency unfold, my mind can’t let go of the fact that we have absolutely no clue what deranged, probably illegal #%$&# is actually happening in the Trump White House on a daily basis. I created Bela to give us a fly-on-the-wall, first-person account. “And it turns out,” he adds, “to be worse than you could have possibly imagined.” Raymond is also the author of a popular series of novellas titled “Saigon: Too Big To Fail”, set in a tongue-in-cheek mash-up of Saigon 1967 and Wall Street 2008. iPhones tucked into the hip pockets of bell-bottoms? Check. Grunts humping Portable Bloomberg Terminals through rice paddies? Roger that. Bank CEOs riding Hueys to work instead of Town Cars? Cue The Jefferson Airplane. “For those shocked by the almost universal lack of individual prosecution related to the worst financial crisis in almost a century, those ‘Saigon’ stories proved to be cathartic," he explains. “For those of you who can’t get enough of MSNBC, ‘The Hunt for Red November’ books are the print version of Must See TV.” Geoffrey Raymond writes and paints in Troy, New York.