About Frank Able

Frank Able writes Nordic Tech Noir: tech thrillers about systems, power, and the people caught between them.

Frank's debut novel, The Chain, follows Mats Frost, a developer who built a currency to give people money no bank could freeze and no government could stop. He verified every line of it. He never verified the man who paid for it. Now the foundation behind his currency launders the world’s dirty money through code he wrote, his friend is dead, Rina Sakai, the cryptographer whose proofs the network runs on, has been taken, and every fix he ships leaves a trace.

Frank Able is the pen name of Erik Stenman, Klarna’s first CTO and author of The BEAM Book. He has spent more than three decades building large-scale distributed systems, payment platforms, and infrastructure for regulated industries. He holds a PhD in computer science for his work on the Erlang virtual machine, and designed FATE, the virtual machine that runs smart contracts on the æternity blockchain.

The technology in his novels is grounded in reality; the characters, events, and organizations are imagined.

Frank lives in Sweden and divides his time between writing, software, and long walks where reasonable ideas become increasingly unreasonable.

The pen name

The pen name keeps the fiction separate from the professional work and lets the stories stand on their own. It is not a secret: the person behind it is named above, and the technical claims the books make are his to answer for.

Books

The Chain. A Nordic Tech Noir novel about code, coercion, and the ledger that remembers everything. Published by Vexilla, 9 September 2026. Buy on Amazon for Kindle (paperback and hardcover also out now), or add it on Goodreads.

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