What is the title of your latest release?
GONE TO GROUND
What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
Two brothers from the streets of LA wind up in the crosshairs of a hedge-fund fixer.
How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
The novel is set in a typical LA working class, immigrant neighborhood which is where I have been a teacher for the past thirty years. Some streets are teeming with life and around the corner its four blocks of defeat. Like a bomb went off and it’s been years since anyone thought to go back outside. You have fishbowl living in high-density housing right across from the landed barrio gentry with their wrought iron fencing meant to keep the bangers out but only serve to give the homes the appearance of bird cages.
Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
Hang out, no. But in four weeks I will be taking a busload of kids – academic grinders like the protagonist – on an overnight trip to visit UC Santa Barbara and Stanford. Eleven hours on a bus will be the closest I get to hang out. They’re middle school kids, most have not been outside LA County, even fewer have spent a night away from their parents, so it’s going to be something special.
What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Grinder, conflicted, wound (as in wound up, like a spring…maybe there’s a better word)
What’s something you learned while writing this book?
I found the antagonist – a garden variety psychopath – actually understands political economy of the ghetto better than most politicians. Take away his team of contract killers and give him a budget, and he might actually run an effective redevelopment agency. The book is full of set pieces that strain credulity, though I now see some of them playing out. Take the ICE raids – in the book they’re staged with hired actors kicking down doors – but now, similar scenes are starting to take place with masked agents grabbing university students with strong opinions and sticking them in the back of cars. North Korea? Nope, just another spring day in Boston.
Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
Put the sand in the box first. When I draft, I ‘m dumping the wheelbarrow out and going back for another load. When I taught English, we did things called quick-writes where you have to keep the pencil moving for three minutes straight even if you end up simply writing the same word over and over. Universally, the best ideas emerge around the two-and-a-half-minute mark. Only after you rid your head of the conscious dreck that you find something original. My novel is just over three hundred pages, and I have another three hundred pages of orphaned ideas.
What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
My mother-in-law makes something called dal dohkli which is from a part of India called Gujarat. She knows I love it, and the dish takes hours to make, and it’s now my life’s ambition to learn how to make it. I think she’s giving me a failing grade so far.
Describe your writing space/office!
I’m sitting right now at the granite island in my kitchen which seems to be where I write the most. I have a desk upstairs which offers more privacy, but it’s a mess right now.
Who is an author you admire?
Richard Price is first on my list. His prose style is untouchable. Open any book, find a paragraph, and there’s a good chance, those five to ten sentences are a complete story with a micro-tension pulling the whole thing forward. He wrote the funniest line in the tv show The Wire. A plain clothes officer spots a kid from the streets with his ball cap turned ninety-degrees with the bill over his ear. The cop asks where he can buy one of those because the only ones he ever sees for sale have the bill in the front.
Is there a book that changed your life?
Mystic River wrecked me and is the high-bar for the genre I write. Demon Copperhead is the best book I’ve ever read in terms of plotting, style, and world-building. But my first taste of the “fictive dream” was The Hobbit which I read the summer of seventh grade. Total absorption.
Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
Wait, I was supposed to get a call?
What’s your favorite genre to read?
Suspense.
What’s your favorite movie?
Michael Clayton
What is your favorite season?
Summer, I mean c’mon I’m a teacher.
How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
Dinner with my wife, live music with a river view, and a bottle of wine with friends.
What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
Derry Girls. What a shocker this was. Amazing writing, four strong seasons, and to its credit, they ended it before it went stale as sooooo many do.
What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Gujarati (a type of Indian)
What do you do when you have free time?
I travel with my wife, read, and go on meditation retreats. The last one sounds like it comes with massages and sound baths. It doesn’t. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done so I guess it’s not really free time.
What can readers expect from you next?
The sequel follows Javier, now out of college and working in private equity. His half-sister Betzaida is still driving her tow truck in Van Nuys and when she comes across the body of an old friend, she knows its time repay an old debt. Javier, disenchanted with the number of knife wounds in his back already at his current firm, picks up a trail during the funeral and soon finds himself up to his hips in the blood-sport of Colorado River water rights where multinational agribusinesses operate with their own set of rules. Meanwhile, Betzaida has reached out to the homies to chase a down a different lead that doesn’t involve stock shorts and credit default swaps, but rather relies on the simple logic of street justice.
GONE TO GROUND by Morgan Hatch
The first in a suspenseful new trilogy, a fast-paced thriller set in the streets of Los Angeles, featuring a Mexican American high school senior embroiled in a conspiracy that threatens to destroy his neighborhood.
Javier Jimenez is on a glide path to college while his brother, Alex, has done a 180 and is heading for trouble. Neither, however, have any idea what’s coming their way when George Jones sets in motion his plan for their neighborhood. “Some people flip homes. I flip zip codes.” It’s a cataclysmic vision of urban renewal replete with manmade disasters, civil unrest, and a tsunami of ambitious Zoomers.
Meanwhile, Alex and Javier’s feud quickly escalates, even as Alex finds himself in way over his head with Denker Street, the local gang. The bodies start falling, and Javier soon realizes Jones has put a target on his back. It’s time to go to ground. Can he keep Alex from falling further into the streets? Can he outplay Jones at his own game? All this and his own hopes, once so bright, now fading like a smog-shrouded LA skyline.
Thriller Crime [Black Rose Writing, On Sale: July 31, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book , ISBN: 9781685136345 / ]
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About Morgan Hatch
Having been a teacher for thirty years in the public schools of Los Angeles, Morgan Hatch now writes about the people and places he’s encountered in the classrooms and neighborhoods in which he’s worked. Inspired by true events detailed in his blog, Gone To Ground is his debut novel. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife.
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