Blood Lines is coming out in just a few weeks and I can’t wait to share it with readers! To preorder the book, and to read the first two chapters right now, click here.
Also, the dates and locations for our publicity tour are now listed here. We are unfortunately only able to do a fairly limited tour this time around, but if we’re coming to a location near you we hope to see you there!
Well, the contentious election is (mostly) behind us, and a once-in-a-century global pandemic still rages. This is a challenging time for the country and the world, but I hope that everyone can manage to have a happy, restful, and safe holiday season.
Some book news:
First, the mass-market paperback edition of The Deserter is now available. I love the new cover design that Simon and Schuster has created for it, and I am excited for the opportunity to reach an even larger audience. I got my hands on a copy, and it feels like the perfect book to crack open while lounging on the beach. If you’re not at the beach in December, it also makes a particularly chunky stocking stuffer. You can pick up your copy here. And if you’re interested in gifting a hardcover copy, Barnes & Noble is still offering specially-bound signed editions.
In other news, I am currently hard at work on the sequel to The Deserter, which will see CID Agents Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor team back up on a new case. They are sent to Berlin to investigate the murder of a fellow CID Agent whose body is found in a neighborhood heavily populated by recent Arab refugees. Was this an act of terrorism? What was the murdered agent doing in Berlin? Can Brodie and Taylor trust the American Embassy officials and German law enforcement officers they must work alongside? Needless to say, all is not what it seems.
The book will be a stand-alone title, while also continuing the larger narrative threads introduced in The Deserter. I am very excited about how it is shaping up, and eager to share it with you all. We don’t have a pub date yet, though I can say with confidence that it will come out after my father’s next solo effort––a John Corey book entitled The Maze which will be published in 2021.
That’s all the news for now. I hope everyone stays safe, healthy, and mostly sane. Here’s to a better New Year ahead ––
Welcome to my new website! Here is where I will post regular updates and musings. The Deserter will be debuting at BookExpo in NYC at the end of May, so I will post some updates and reactions during and/or after the event. In the meantime, a little background on the book and how this collaboration came to be —
When my father first approached me about co-writing a novel with him, I wasn’t sure if I was up to the task. He is a bestselling author with a unique voice and a large and well-deserved following, and I wanted to make sure that if I took this on I would have something to add to the collaboration. He assured me it would be easy, which I knew was a lie, and that it would be rewarding, which I am happy to discover was true. I was afforded the opportunity to both flex my creative muscle and learn a few things from a master of the craft. I checked my ego at the door, and was in turn rewarded with a lot of trust.
By the time I was approached about collaborating, my father had already landed on the concept of two Army CID agents, Warrant Officers Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor, pursuing an Army deserter, Kyle Mercer, loosely based on Bowe Bergdahl. I suggested we promote our deserter to a Special Forces captain—as opposed to a hapless private—and that we take the action to Venezuela.
Caracas, Venezuela
Why Venezuela? For one, I have always had a perverse fascination with authoritarian leaders and their attendant cults of personality, and Hugo Chávez seemed to embody the interesting contradictions of so many authoritarians, at once menacing and buffoonish. Chávez is dead, but his legacy and his memory still hold a spell over Venezuela that rivals that of their national hero, Simón Bolívar. Venezuela is currently in a struggle for its very survival, and what side of that struggle you are on depends a lot on your opinion of the beefy guy in the red beret whose image is plastered all over the country.
I also picked Venezuela because it is dangerous, and therefore it is interesting. Part of a storyteller’s job is to build a dynamic world, and to put dynamic people in it, and to throw everything you can at those people and hope they rise to the challenge—or fail in an interesting way. Sending our heroes to Caracas seemed like a perfect way to screw up their day and see how—and if—they made it out alive.
When I told friends and acquaintances about this collaboration, one of the most common reactions I would get was about how difficult it must be to work with your parent. I didn’t find that. Maybe it’s because I grew up around the business, and admiring my father’s creativity and work ethic, and with a certain reverence for storytelling that led me onto my own career path in filmmaking. We approached this project from a place of mutual respect, and I knew to defer to his instincts when differences came up. It’s been an honor and a privilege to circle back to the creative form that first got me interested in narrative storytelling, and to collaborate with the man who first inspired me and showed me the way.