Histria Books is pleased to announce the release of False Positive: A Southern Boy’s Descent Into the Global Drug War by Tristan Nettles. This memoir is published by Histria Perspectives, an imprint dedicated to publishing outstanding works of nonfiction that illuminate history, culture, and society.
Tristan Nettles was a Southern boy with big plans and a lot of nerve. On the Thai island of Koh Samui he built a life of beach villas, birthday parties and easy money, and the money came from selling drugs. In the middle of it all he met Ashley Oosthuizen, a nineteen-year-old South African teaching at an international school, who laughed easily and trusted him completely.
False Positive follows Tristan from the first sale to the fall. It runs through Thai beaches, a Cambodian clinic, parties that lasted until morning and a drug trade where one mistake ends everything. Ashley is at the center of it. Two years after they met, a Thai court sentenced her to death. The sentence was later reduced to life in prison. Tristan has to live with his part in that. The book is his answer. After her sentence he spent fifteen months teaching himself to code and writing this account, so the world would learn who Ashley is and what happened to her. Her story is why the book exists, and every reader helps keep her name in front of the people who can still change her fate.
Tristan Seth Nettles is an American author, combat veteran, and world traveler born in Atlanta in 1987. After a childhood marked by a severe speech impediment and a troubled adolescence, he served in the Marine Corps infantry and earned a B.S. in Biology from the University of North Florida. His experiences, including combat service in Ukraine and years spent living abroad, inform fiction concerned with ambition, loyalty, and the consequences of personal choices. Nettles writes with an eye for physical detail and the contradictions in how people understand themselves. He currently lives abroad and advocates for the release of Ashley Oosthuizen.
