California businessman James Jensen built his fortune on the belief that free markets would empower people and spread prosperity around the globe. After decades of investment in overseas companies, he can contemplate a distant retirement with the satisfaction of knowing he has changed the world for the better.

Then an old colleague disappears in war-torn eastern Ukraine, and James must decide how far he will go to help his friend, a onetime leader in the anti-Communist underground spurred to new activism by the ascendant nationalism in his native Poland.

As he journeys deeper into the region he once hoped to liberate through capitalism, James encounters a landscape of gangsters, dubious loyalties, and alleged global conspiracies. Will Gustaw Bogutsky's disappearance threaten the legacy of his career bringing free, uncensored thought to former Communist countries? Can James retain his own faith in that mission?

Inspired by American entrepreneur James D. Jameson, Polish publisher Grzegorz Boguta, and their friendship forged in history, Underground Man is a work of fiction exploring the post-Soviet liberal world order and the challenges posed to it by the rise of nationalist movements a quarter century later.