The Prodigy, a new novel by Oklahoma City attorney Dee A. Replogle, Jr., begins in a unified Berlin at the end of the millennium, but the bulk of the international thriller is set in various cities with the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) as the backdrop. Replogle has long been a fan of Tom Clancy, Brad Thor, John le Carré and Vince Flynn, among others, and their influence shows through in both content and construction.
The story combines the history of communism’s fall in Europe with Replogle’s fascination with subjects ranging from finance to neuroscience. After a brief introductory chapter set in 1999, the larger story begins with a Stasi officer who is made aware that powerful people in the East German state intend to kidnap his 2-year-old son, Peter.
Just dropping the word “Stasi” into a paragraph highlights the problem Replogle is up against from a world-building perspective. East Germany ceased to exist in October 1990 with reunification, and while its importance in geopolitics was extraordinary, 35 years later, much of our cultural awareness of the main actors in the Cold War has faded to the U.S. versus the USSR, or perhaps Soviet bloc countries. That means Replogle couldn’t just write a story; he has to explain the setting and machinations to remind us what it was like then, and that leads to the book’s main flaw, which is admittedly a nitpick, and that is the tendency toward pedantic passages that provide insight into the historic setting and the way the author’s brain works.
Friendly feedback
Replogle is both highly formally educated and an autodidact in areas unrelated to his formal training. After graduating from Casady School — he is an OKC native — he completed degrees from Stanford University, University of Oklahoma College of Law and New York University (post-doc), and he has 54 years of experience in the practice of law, nearly all of it at McAfee & Taft in estate planning and mergers and acquisitions. But he also reads voraciously about things he finds fascinating, particularly neuroscience and his family’s German roots.
“I was in Berlin when I decided it would be fun to write a book,” Replogle said. “I intended to write it for myself and print 50 to 100 copies for friends and family. If I didn’t like it, I’d move on to something else. I was genuinely surprised at the feedback from friends.”
Two of those friends in particular provided the impetus to publish the book for a wider audience. Replogle gave an early draft of the book to two colleagues, one of whom had written and published a novel and one he was sure wouldn’t like the book. But because she’d been first in her class in law school, he suspected he’d get honest feedback. The latter told him, “I couldn’t put it down!”
The former explained the tedious process of getting a book published without a famous name.
“He said he got more than 30 rejections from publishers before one finally accepted it, so he said, ‘Just self-publish.’ So I did,” Replogle said.
He researched companies that helped authors self-publish and landed with Archway Publishing, a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster.
When reading The Prodigy, which is, in fact, a page-turner and well-constructed story, readers who are familiar with self-published books will notice immediately that Replogle’s mastery of English — he loves Faulkner, and it shows — means we get none of the cringey grammatical and mechanical issues that plague other amateurs. That makes it much easier to enjoy the actual story.
“I was talking to some friends I went to Casady with, and I told them if our English teacher Mrs. (Margaret) Tuck saw the book, she’d ask who my ghostwriter is,” Replogle said.
Jokes aside, an amateur writer who doesn’t need a proofreader has a huge advantage over his peers.
Beyond the grammatical mastery, what Replogle brings to the genre is a love for details and an ability to think complexly about plotting. His commitment to research also means he avoids the errors of fact that also plague amateur writers’ work. His knack for explaining things in clear language is a bonus in world-building, and here’s hoping that the second book — he’s planning three — will simply move the exposition out of dialogue, the book’s only other real flaw. To be fair, dialog is often cited as one of the most difficult things for writers to do well, and Replogle was met with an unusual challenge in writing his character: savantism.
How does someone with no real emotional affect speak? In the book, Peter’s voice can fall a little short as Replogle tries to write lines for a neurodivergent who, as is often the case, will simply report details that ought to elicit an emotional response in the speaker. That often translates better to film than print, but this, too, is a nitpick. The story is entertaining, compact, well-paced and suffused with the kind of details that add to the enjoyment.
Forensic approach
As for his process, Replogle is an open-ended writer. This is not a series that is sketched out in advance.
“I had no preconceived notion of how the book would end,” Replogle said. “I didn’t know how a single chapter would end when I sat down to write it. I just wrote as a way of entertaining myself, allowing the story to emerge.”
Many writing programs will tell you that’s the wrong way, but that is more a preference of the instructor and less an actual rule. For Replogle, it certainly works. His forensic approach to the process kept him from committing errors of continuity, so it doesn’t read like he was allowing the story to emerge. The narrative holds together in large part, most likely, because Replogle’s 54 years of experience in future-casting makes him very good at keeping multiple threads and possibilities discrete in his mind as he writes.
That means whether the characters are in Berlin or Utah, the story doesn’t get muddied, and there are no loose ends, unresolved subplots or clear contradictions. His characters are fully formed, and the father, Friedrich, is easily the best constructed: Full of paternal concern, somehow menacing and serious at times, dogged, careful, deliberate, but thoroughly likeable, he emerges as the star over his son, who, admittedly, is more target than central character. This is Friedrich’s story, so book two, hopefully out in fall 2026 when Peter is 23, will be Peter’s story.
“I’m still reading and studying to get ready for book two,” Replogle said. “I’ll be going to a conference in Chicago for the International Society for Intelligence Research this summer. Other aspects of the book require me to go back to Germany for more research. I’m hoping that researchers at the University of Tübingen will meet with me and let me tour their research laboratories. The second book involves researchers, and it becomes a spy novel with a focus on solving the ‘problem’ of savantism.”
In the meantime, The Prodigy is available to order, and like other readers, I understand why many are asking Replogle if he has thought about optioning it as a movie or series.
Visit dreploglejr.com.
This article appears in City crowned.