Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has collaborated with Pete Earley to write a riveting geopolitical thriller, “Collusion.” (Broadside Books, 347 pages)

In Kiev, a group of terrorists assassinate U.S. Ambassador Stanford Thorpe. Before dying, Thorpe succeeds in passing a computer flash drive to a security guard, Brett Garrett, with the explicit instructions that he is to deliver the flash drive directly to the President of the United States.

Garrett is an ex-Navy Seal who was court-martialed, imprisoned and dishonorably discharged for a hostage rescue mission in Cameroon that went tragically awry.

Now working as a security consultant, Garrett finds himself recruited by the CIA to help execute a most daring plan — aid Yakov Prokofyevich Pavel, Deputy Russian foreign minister, and his teenage grandson defect from Russia and the clutches of its brutal president Vyachesian Leninovich Kalugin.

What Garrett discovers is a massive plot of Russian collusion of the most deadly kind — as the Kremlin has teamed with left-wing radical extremists in America to carry out an act of terrorism so extreme it threatens the very existence of the United States.

At the end of this well-executed and very provocative novel, Gingrich and Earley insert a most sobering dose of reality as they attach a partial listing of murders and other suspicious deaths concerning critics of Russian president Putin — the list takes up nearly six pages.