Before Van Fleisher wrote a single novel, he read thousands of them—mostly at 35,000 feet. Across two careers, one with an airline and one in management consulting, he racked up over a million miles in the air and countless hours stranded in airports across more than 30 countries. His defense against the tedium was books, and he became a connoisseur of the kind of storytelling that could make a long-haul flight disappear. He still credits James Patterson, Tom Clancy, Patricia Cornwell, John Grisham, and others with making thousands of those flight hours vanish without a trace.
When Van retired, he decided it was time to stop being distracted by other people’s stories and start writing his own. He wasn’t a stranger to writing—decades of newsletters, white papers, case studies, and brochures had sharpened his prose—but fiction was new territory. What he lacked in novelist experience, he made up for in raw material: a life spent living and working across the globe gave him no shortage of characters, cultures, and conflict to draw from.
The result was Final Notice, a thriller that took aim at gun violence, immigration, and a fractured political system—and struck a chord with thousands of readers. Final Act followed, deepening those themes while lending its voice to the #MeToo movement (and throwing in a few Russians for good measure). Then came Final Chance, a book so prescient about climate change and special-interest politics that Van jokes it’s less science fiction than a preview of the evening news. Reader response has been so strong that he’s since adapted the first two novels into a two-part screenplay.
These days, Van calls himself “VF3″—his life’s third chapter—and he’s rarely idle. Between fiction and nonfiction works-in-progress, ghostwriting projects, and the occasional consulting gig, he still makes time for his most important collaborator: Yogi, his Goldendoodle and best friend. Their partnership produced Yogi’s Story, a heartwarming memoir told from Yogi’s perspective, tracing the past lives his paws have wandered through. It’s a book that will make you laugh, make you cry, and remind you why dogs make the best storytellers of all.
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