God has a plan for Ben Brice, or so his mother had always said and so he had always believed, right up until that dark night in Vietnam in 1968. Now sixty, Ben lives alone in a remote cabin outside Taos, drowns his memories in Jim Beam, and wonders what God's plan had been and why it had gone so wrong. But when Gracie, his ten-year-old granddaughter, is abducted outside Dallas, Ben puts down the bottle and goes in search of her, afraid that his dark past has come back to haunt her. And he learns that his mother had been right all along.

And that is the central idea of the book: Is there a plan to our lives or are our lives just a series of random events? For example, is it part of a plan that the world's three main religions all took root in the same place in the world, a place that just happens to sit above an ocean of oil that the entire world now depends on some 2,000 years later, oil that has brought the three religions into conflict today? Or is it just a random coincidence?

I had met several Vietnam veterans who had been profoundly affected by their war experiences, so I began reading extensively about the war, including the atrocities of war. And I wondered how a normal human being would be affected by such acts. So I knew I wanted a tormented Vietnam veteran to be the main character. And when several children were abducted in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, I decided to center the story around an abduction because I knew, as a father, that I would never stop searching for my child.

I want readers to be entertained by the story and to ponder the theory of life: plan or random?

The Abduction spent four weeks on the UK Top 20 bestseller list, five weeks on the Australian Top 10 list, and six weeks on the Irish Top 10 list.