Buy Amazon | Kindle BN | iTunes | Sony IndieBound Books-A-Million Grand Central   In 2011, I had the honor of going on a USO tour to Afghanistan. Many of you probably know this; I’ve written about it and talked about it a lot. It was a memorable experience. Nevertheless, I wasn’t compelled to base a book on it. Not specifically anyway. First of all, there are many standout authors who write military/espionage/action-adventure books, including my friends Mark Bowden, Andrew Peterson, and Clive Cussler, who were also on that tour. I couldn’t possibly compete with their genius, and I didn’t even want to try. But that experience must have influenced me, at least tangentially. Because, while contemplating what to write about next, I began thinking about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It occurred to me that it wouldn’t necessarily be confined to men and women in uniform. I thought back to the contractors, vendors, medical personnel we met on the military bases, who are often in as much danger as service members. Wouldn’t spending time in a war zone have a profound, possibly debilitating, affect on them as well? That’s when Dawson Scott, my hero, decided to step out of…

Jay, who, you ask? Jay Burgess, one of the main characters in my new novel, SMOKE SCREEN, which, by the way, goes on sale today. I’m sure you’re wondering how and why a main character can be dead (and not a ghostly presence), but this is very much the case with Jay, and even though he’s deceased, I still had to make him as dynamic as every other character in the book. You see, everything in SMOKE SCREEN revolves around Jay, his childhood friend, Raley Gannon, our intrepid heroine, Britt Shelley and a fire. And much like the fire, a single event that fuels the back-story of nearly every character in the book, Jay Burgess is a man who impacted many lives. Besides Jay, Raley and Britt, there’s a host of other characters. Matter of fact, SMOKE SCREEN probably has more characters than any other book I’ve written. This is due in part to the villain not being revealed until so late in the book. Keeping that identity a secret necessitated creating four or five viable suspects and each of them needed motive, opportunity and most importantly, character traits that define them, make them seem not only real but unique…