The Mark Playne collection - 3 x paperbacks (3XPB)

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The Collection

Three paperback books.

One Truth.

You have felt it.

That moment when every logical argument pointed one direction, but something deeper pulled another way.

When the sensible choice felt wrong and the irrational choice felt true.

When your gut knew what your mind could not yet prove.

What if that voice deserves more trust than you have been taught to give it?

Across three works spanning continents, genres and decades, multi-award-winning filmmaker Mark Playne explores the collision between what we are told and what we know, between inherited logic and innate wisdom, between the loud certainties of the world and the quiet knowing that persists beneath them.

These are books about listening to the voice that has always been there.

AI & I: Cracking the COVID Code 

AI & I: Cracking the COVID Code An AI Empowered Forensic Investigation: 2026 edition -paperback and hardback coming soon!

What happens when a filmmaker sits down with an artificial intelligence and refuses to accept the sanitised answers?

This book is the result. A relentless, chapter-by-chapter interrogation of the COVID pandemic, the vaccines, the excess deaths, the suppressed treatments and the institutions that stayed silent. The AI, pushed hard enough, says things nobody expected.

★★★★★ "Absolute genius. Can't stop reading this. This book will change the world." Steven Ford

The 2026 edition is the definitive version. Professionally copy-edited, substantially expanded and built for sharing. New international data across 18 countries. New graphs. A key infographic. New chapters protecting teenagers and the elderly from future pressure. A new foreword from a retired Oxford-trained GP with 44 years of practice.

★★★★★ "The information is extremely well put-together and explains scientific terms in a way that the man in the street can comprehend." Dan Roberts

Clear enough for any reader. Rigorous enough for a scientist. Polished enough to hand to your GP.

★★★★★ "This is a gift to humanity." Sian Davies Shipton

The investigation continues. The case is stronger than ever.

3 Seconds in Bogotá: A True Story of Travel, Terror and Survival

Mark Playne had done everything right.

Six months travelling South America.

Every robbery scenario rehearsed.

Every precaution taken.

Three separate money stashes.

Studied responses for every conceivable threat.

His logical mind had prepared a fortress of contingencies.

Then came the moment none of it covered.

Past midnight in the Colombian capital.

A knife at the taxi driver's throat.

Armed men surrounding the vehicle.

Three seconds until the doors open.

His preparations offered nothing.

Every rehearsed response was useless.

And in that frozen instant, as time stretched and his rational mind flailed, a voice emerged from somewhere deeper:

"I've always been here. You're normally too busy to hear me."

This true story is not about planning.

It is about what happens when planning fails and something older takes over.

As the narrator sifts through a lifetime of memories in those suspended seconds, he searches not for what he was taught, but for what he somehow already knows.

The question becomes brutally simple: trust the logical mind that built the useless fortress, or trust the gut feeling that logic cannot explain?

His life, and the life of his girlfriend, depend on the answer.

Readers have called it "a Hollywood movie disguised as a travel memoir" and "possibly the best-written travel memoir I have ever read."

It is a book about the moment when you discover that your deepest instincts may be the only thing worth trusting.

MoMo: The Incredible Adventures of Me, My Duck and a Man Called Wolof

Everyone tells MoMo what is possible.

His poverty tells him. His village tells him. His grandmother, who loves him fiercely, tells him plainly: "We are born into circles that we cannot escape from. Generation after generation."

But when MoMo watches the geese fly overhead, something inside him refuses to agree. When he speaks to his duck, something answers. When he looks at the horizon, something whispers that he belongs beyond it.

He cannot explain this knowing. He cannot argue for it. He simply feels it, as surely as he feels hunger or cold.

Set in the crumbling ruins of a North African kasbah, this is the story of a boy whose inner compass proves more reliable than every rational voice telling him to stay small. From the markets where instinct teaches him to see value where others see nothing, to a perilous journey that claims thousands, MoMo follows a feeling that logic insists is foolish.

Compared by readers to The Little Prince and The Alchemist, this tale reminds us what children know before the world teaches them to doubt it: that the quiet voice within often sees further than the loud voices without.

Sometimes the irrational path is the only one that leads somewhere worth going.

The Common Thread Between all Three Books

A child in Morocco is told he will never fly. He flies.

A traveller in Colombia faces something logic cannot solve. He survives by abandoning logic and everythiung he was taught.

A reader picks up a book about a pandemic and realises that the quiet unease they felt for years was not anxiety or ignorance. It was clarity.

Three books. Three settings. Three protagonists facing something that looked, by every reasonable measure, impossible to overcome. And in each case, the thing that carries them through is not expertise, not authority, not the weight of consensus. It is the small, persistent, easily ridiculed voice that refuses to accept what it is being told.

We are taught from childhood to distrust that voice. To defer to systems. To value logic over feeling, credentials over instinct, the loud and the certain over the quiet and the doubtful. It is presented as wisdom. It may be the most damaging lesson we ever learn.

Because what runs through all three of these books is the same recurring truth: that intuition is not a soft word for guesswork. During a pandemic, during street violence in Bogota, during a childhood in rural Morocco where the sky itself seems unreachable, intuition is a survival mechanism. The one that functions precisely when every official instrument has been captured, corrupted or simply pointed in the wrong direction.

The boy in Morocco does not need permission to believe he can fly. The traveller in Colombia does not survive by following procedure. And the millions of people who felt, from the very first press conference of the COVID pandemic, that something was profoundly wrong with what they were being told were not confused, not fringe, not to be corrected.

They were, all of them, doing the same thing.

Trusting the most human instrument available when the world was shouting otherwise.

Intuition and empathy are not weaknesses. They are the vital core of our humanity. And in each of these three books, they are what makes the impossible survivable.