A few months after graduating with a Master’s in Architecture from the American University of Beirut, renewed fighting forced Raymond to leave his homeland once again, following a previous relocation to New York during high school due to civil war. Evacuated from Beirut by a US Marines Chinook, he moved to France, where he completed an MBA at INSEAD in Fontainebleau and started a career in finance.

However, after a few uninspiring years in investment banking, Raymond decided to return to his creative roots, launching a career in film and TV. He sold original screenplays to Working Title, and Robert DeNiro announced he would star in Raymond’s adaptation of The Maid of Buttermere, a novel by Melvyn Bragg. Raymond also worked on TV series such as Spooks and Waking the Dead, with Spooks earning a BAFTA nomination for Best Drama Series.

In 2005, Raymond turned an old screenplay into The Last Templar, which became a global sensation. It spent 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, held the #1 spot in Germany for 21 weeks, and was translated into 38 languages. The Last Templar was later adapted into a 4-hour NBC miniseries and a French comic book series. Raymond followed with six more New York Times bestsellers, selling over 10 million copies globally. His latest, The Ottoman Secret (Empire of Lies in the US), is an alternate reality story set in a present-day Ottoman Paris, praised as a “classic of the genre” and a “thought-provoking mind bender.”