Mike Wendland has spent his life chasing the question at the center of his first novel: how do you know what really happened?

He started with the Hardy Boys, handed to him by his sister when he was eight or nine, and never stopped reading. He became a reporter, and over more than 40 years in print and broadcast news he was an investigative reporter for The Detroit News and WDIV-TV in Detroit, a columnist for the Detroit Free Press and technology correspondent for NBC News Channel. His work has appeared in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He covered world leaders, wars and consumer affairs, and won 18 Emmy Awards along the way. The work taught him how easily a true set of facts can be arranged into a false picture.

That discipline runs through The Tenth of Av, Book One of a five-book thriller series. Its hero, Ray Mercer, is a veteran Michigan investigative reporter who is sent through a classified opening in a hillside in Israel into Jerusalem in AD 68, two years before the Roman army burned the Temple. He goes as a skeptic and a witness. What he finds among the city's first followers of Jesus, and what waits for him when he comes home, is the story of the series. Mike built the first-century world from Josephus and the historical record and checked it the way he once checked a news story. The books carry a faith theme because of where they are set, but they are thrillers first, and nobody in them is argued into believing anything.

For the past 15 years he and his wife, Jennifer, have built RV Lifestyle Media from a single blog into a travel media company with more than a million followers and subscribers across YouTube, a twice-weekly podcast, a blog, 30 RV travel guides and custom travel apps. Together they have traveled nearly half a million miles across all 48 contiguous states.

He also writes The Last Reporter on Substack, essays on news, history, faith, and what happens to a big story when there is nobody left to report it. He and Jennifer live in southwest Michigan when they are not on the road.

Book Two, Seventy-One Days, is next.