David LoBurgio – Author

Dangerous Road Home

Book 1 of The Divided States of America Series

In a divided future America, survival means questioning everything you thought you knew.

In 2055, the United States is fractured. When State Department diplomat Noah Hart’s mission to the New Confederate States goes catastrophically wrong, he finds himself the sole survivor of a brutal militia ambush that kills his colleagues and shatters his faith in the system he serves.

Wounded and hunted, Noah is rescued by Bill Edwards, a former Atlanta paramedic, and his fifteen-year-old daughter Caroline. As the unlikely trio forms a bond that transcends the tribal divisions tearing America apart, Noah discovers his rescuers harbor a secret. Where should his loyalties lie? What is the price of survival?

Their desperate flight to the border becomes a journey that will force Noah to question everything he believed about duty, loyalty, and the price of serving his country.

The Longer Way Back

Book 2 of The Divided States of America Series

In a divided future America, survival means questioning everything you thought you knew. 

— sequel to The Dangerous Road Home

In 2056, a year after the attack that nearly killed him, Noah Hart is back at his desk in Washington, watching his career quietly dissolve. His department is being eliminated. His brother has signed a factory contract in the New Confederate States of America and disappeared behind fences in Tennessee. The protests filling the streets feel orchestrated. And a presidential candidate named Ryan Middleton seems to know too much about Noah’s life.

When Middleton offers Noah a Senate staff position, the pay is generous and the timeline is suspicious. Within days, Noah understands why he was hired—not for his expertise but for what he represents. Middleton uses the deadly mission from the year before as a political weapon, and Noah’s presence on his staff is all the proof anyone needs.

Trapped by a classification order and an NDA, Noah digs into what Middleton and his running mate, tech trillionaire Evan Pryce, are actually building. The jobs they’re promising aren’t what voters think. The protests may not be real. And the land Pryce is quietly buying across the Midwest has a purpose that could reshape how Americans work and live for generations.

With an election weeks away, Noah turns to the mentor who gave him his start in politics and discovers that what’s happening may be unethical but not illegal—and that the people operating above him are playing a longer game than he imagined.

Meanwhile, back in suburban Chicago, a coffee shop connection may be the only thing standing between a good man in South Carolina and ruin.

The Longer Way Back is a story about power, leverage, and the slow education of a young man learning that understanding a system doesn’t protect you from being used by it.