For almost three tumultuous decades, insurance and investment fund executive Russell R. Miller, plied his trade in China and Southeast Asia. Buying and selling companies, setting up new ones and moving into public service by creating cultural and educational organizations -- all the while witnessing far reaching societal transformation in China and her neighbors.

American Investment banker and business executive Russell R. Miller shares several decades of diverse experience in Southeast Asia where he had a close-up view of sweeping changes in the economy and cultures of the region. Not content to merely be an observer of social change, Mr Miller works with government officials and Non-Governmental Organizations to encourage entrepreneurship and also tackles momentous events like the SARS epidemic. Lavishly illustrated with color photographs throughout, here is a front row seat to the continual transformation of Southeast Asia in the twenty-first century. In Russell R. Miller's words: "This is not a travelogue or a diary of visits and adventures in Asia. If I could write as well as Somerset Maugham when he sketched his vivid impressions in On a Chinese Screen, I would do it. What follows are recollections of memorable moments and vivid people I have met in countries ranging from Japan to Indonesia. I have lived in some of these places, and others I just briefly passed through, but all have touched me in some deep way. Share the saunter, meet the people. It will change you."

Death on the Silk Road By Russell R. Miller: Is a contemporary traveler's tale of deceit, deception and international intrigue, involving an ordinary man facing extraordinary circumstances in a highly unusual location. Charlie Connelly, a retired international executive with tenuous ties to the Central Intelligence Agency finds himself on a consulting project for a global banking corporation assigned to a mining project in the remote Tien Shan Mountains of newly independent Kazakhstan. A silent killer with obscure motives threatens Connolly and a group of mismatched international specialists who are isolated by a blinding snowstorm. As members of the project begin to disappear, Connolly's handler back at Langley attempts to sort out the identities and motives of an indigenous Islamic group competing with China and Russia for the oil and rare mineral deposits in the resource-rich Kazakh Republic. Russell Miller, winner of the American Authors Association Silver Quill Award for his previous novel The Spy with a Clean Face, relies on his extensive international experience traveling to over 100 countries to craft a complex geopolitical thriller ripped from current headlines.

Russell Miller has adeptly applied fictional flesh to a factual skeleton in a far-ranging tale of deceit and betrayal. The narrative twists and turns through Latin American and Asian locales as the search for a rogue agent ultimately leads to the Chernobyl dead zone; while the newly independent Ukrainian Government teeters precariously between East and West. Charlie Connelly is an average corporate executive, with three children and a home in the suburbs-as well as almost forgotten ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. He is unexpectedly reminded of this past association when approached by his former recruiter, accompanied by a stunning female agent. Their seemingly innocent request for assistance eventually leads Connelly, Ludlum-like, through the brightly lighted board-rooms and dimly lit backstreets of Maracaibo, Medellin, Tianjin, and Kiev as he becomes inexorably enmeshed in a murky realm of foreign intrigue. Eventually betrayed by the political maneuverings of a besieged intelligence agency, and abandoned by his own company, Charlie finds himself working on a NGO project in recently independent Ukraine during the Orange Revolution. Once there, he is again contacted by the Agency, and tasked to locate and eliminate a defecting American spy before he can conclude the sale to Iran of Ukrainian owned missiles.

Journey to a Closed City with the International Executive Service Corps describes the adventures of a retired executive volunteering with the senior citizens' equivalent of the Peace Corp as he applies his professional skills in a former Iron Curtain city emerging into the dawn of a new economy. This book is essential reading for anyone approaching retirement who is interested in opportunities to exercise skills to "do good" during expense-paid travel to intriguing locations. Journey to A Closed City should also appeal to armchair travelers eager to explore far-off corners of the world in our rapidly-evolving global community.