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Tuesday, September 19^th will see the release of my sixth book,  CALL THE DARK,  seven years after my debut  – THE FAR EMPTY.

Honestly, the two books couldn’t be more different. Hell, I couldn’t be more different, both as an author and maybe as a person.

Most of my novels have been driven by characters I’d fallen in love with or themes that I’d always wanted to explore. THE FAR EMPTY and the two other books in the Big Bend/Chris Cherry trilogy (HIGH WHITE SUN and THIS SIDE OF NIGHT) examined the “weight of the badge;” the burden and the responsibility that comes with carrying them, and whether you can continue to be a “good” person in a bad world. Chris Cherry and America Reynosa were already strongly fixed characters in my mind when I wrote those books, before I even wrote the first word, and they lived and breathed in that series, animating much of what others would call “plot.”

LOST RIVER was about the opioid epidemic and rural America. It was about my home state, about homecomings, and things I’d seen and experienced as a federal agent while working here. It was personal in a way that even the Big Bend books weren’t, and  I had Trey Dorado’s voice in my head for weeks, and the character of Van Dorn reflected a type of agent and personality I’d encountered in my long career.

THE FLOCK, which was less a crime novel and more a topical thriller – more topical than I first imagined since I wrote during the pandemic – was a thematic exercise for me. I’d always planned to write a novel about a cult, very much wanting to raise questions about faith and belief, and the limits of both. I’d been fascinated by how someone’s truth is often mutable, and the way the media can and sometimes defines our truth.  The aging Elise Blue, a character I loved writing, reflected a lot of my concerns about both aging and parenting.

CALL THE DARK is very different from those previous books. I wrote it after tossing away 100 pages of another book I was writing (okay, writers never quite “toss pages away,” we just save ‘em and hope we can make them better). CALL THE DARK didn’t start with a theme I’d long wanted to explore or even a character I’d been thinking about or a character’s voice in my head, it started with an image—a striking image of a small plane crashing on a remote mountainside during a late night snow storm; a fiery wreck observed by a lone woman, who’s burying…something…in the frozen ground.

Who that woman is, why she’s out that mountainside in the middle of the night, and what she’s burying, were things I only discovered while writing. This book has more of a cinematic, high-concept feel maybe than anything I’ve done (maybe that was because while I was writing it, I was also writing on the upcoming LAWMAN: BASS REEVES cable series). While it deals with some of the themes I always return to  again and again (family, choices, guilt) it’s not a message book. I do hope it’s entertaining and thrilling, though. It’s a very different book for me, but again, I’m a different person too, a different writer. The longer I walk this path, the more novels I get under my belt, I’ve come to learn that each book is a process in and of itself; each new novel is a new exploration, a new journey. Each one is surprising in its own way, even if you don’t end up where you thought you would.

It took me several months to get that young woman off that mountain. Hopefully it won’t take you that long to pick it up and find out how I did it.

JTS