Dan McMeans is a retired sales manager who has found a second career as a writer.
McMeans has written eight books, with another manuscript recently submitted to a publisher for editing and formatting.
“I’ve been quite busy,” he said.
One of McMeans’ books, The Adventures of the Lawndale Gang, chronicled his upbringing in the 1970s hanging out with friends.
His most recent release is Manifestation for Tomorrow, published earlier this summer.
McMeans, who now lives in Somerton, is especially proud of two books published in 2025 – Journeys of The Dublin Trio and Journeys of The Dublin Trio II.
“I wanted to write an adventure story, but I wanted my adventure story to be a little different,” he said.
The books are about Ryan Shamus, a Northeast resident and highly decorated Green Beret Special Ops Officer who is skilled in martial arts, with cunning street smarts. When he returns to civilian life, he has a calling by God to do work for his fellow man, going on mysteries, adventures and crime solving to help serve this purpose.
God came to him as he was walking the Tookany Creek path, giving him the alias of The Dublin Trio to represent his Irish heritage and the Holy Trinity (the Father, Son and Holy Ghost) to help the needy and hopeless, just the way Jesus, Elijah, Moses and Mother Teresa did.
“There’s a common thread of spirituality in all my books, some more than others,” McMeans said.
The Dublin Trio works as a private contractor. McMeans describes him as spiritual but also fearless and by no means passive.
“He’s no pushover,” he said.
At the same time, McMeans said The Dublin Trio stands up for right and wrong and his convictions, using compassion, common sense and faith as his backbone.
In Journeys of the Dublin Trio, the hero stars in all kinds of adventures – helping Lawndale Elementary School students deal with a demon; traveling to El Dorado, the lost city of gold; battling a grandfather clock used for evil purposes; trying to recover the Prophet Abraham’s walking stick, poached from a cavern in Israel to be sold; attempting to dismantle an army base created by Satan; looking for a missing archaeologist; confronting a fallen angel; disrupting Iran’s nuclear capabilities; rescuing a New Zealand girl who had fallen into a vast crater; investigating a ghost-like figure seen in “Torresdale Prison;” and, in the final chapter, entering a time portal to stop Hitler from getting a nuclear bomb.
Journeys of the Dublin Trio II offers similar adventures and adversaries – an evil spirit in a statue in a haunted house, two convicts who commandeer a train and take a hostage, aliens who’ve captured three people, a wizard in a secret tunnel in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Pennsylvania who is under the influence of Satan and members of a Russian fishing ship hunting whales off the coast of Cape Cod. The Dublin Trio also explores an ancient passageway underneath the ground of a Lawndale back yard. And he teams with ancestors of Robin Hood to give money seized in drug deals to the poor.
“I thought I wanted to keep the narratives short and concise,” he said. “That’s the best way to capture the readers’ imagination.”
In writing about The Dublin Trio, McMeans used his own imagination along with historical documentation.
“I researched all my stories so there’s a level of truth and fiction blended together, to give some level of integrity,” he said. ••
To buy any of Dan McMeans’ books or for more information, visit amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or https://www.mcmeansbooks.com/
