Adrenaline Rush follows a former Army Military Police officer turned government investigator who battles violent crimes while confronting the trauma, grief, and rage that have made adrenaline feel safer than peace. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

This question has a layered answer. I actually started writing the blueprint for Adrenaline Rush when I was in middle school. Armed with an old clickity-clack keyboard and a box computer running Windows 97, I was unknowingly building the foundation for what would eventually become an entire series.

As a young girl who loved Sin City and Nancy Drew books, I noticed there were countless stories about male veterans saving the world. And while I loved those stories, I kept wondering what one of those scenarios would look like with a female lead. That’s where Adrenaline Rush was born.

After joining the military at 18, I started molding the story into what it is today—a series that explores the perspectives of both male and female veterans, while placing a stronger focus on how women process combat, trauma, and PTSD. We don’t always process those experiences the same way. I wanted to write something that could both educate and entertain while still feeling raw, human, and real.

Kate is brave and cruel in the same scene, insightful one moment and reckless the next. How do you write a protagonist who is genuinely hard to be with while keeping readers invested in her?

Kate is a real person—and what I mean by that is that’s what I strive to write: characters who feel real. I’m always thinking about how someone would honestly react. Not just anyone, either—but how a veteran who’s been through what Kate has been through would react.

Once again, there are a lot of layers to a person like that. A lot of switches she controls. That’s what she’s been trained to do. Kate has the ability to change her tone immediately based on what she’s assessing. It’s not a gradual emotional shift where she slowly works her way from one mindset to another. She just does it.

That’s what military members are trained to do: assess the situation and adjust fire accordingly. You don’t sit there overthinking it. You react, adapt, and move. For someone like Kate, that instinct never really turns off.

The investigations matter, but the emotional core feels deeply personal. Did you always see the novel more as a survival story than a procedural thriller?

No, I initially saw the series as a thriller, not a survival story. After enlisting in the military and going on my own adventures and deployments, though, my mindset shifted. At first, I was interested in the action—the gunfights, the chaos, the cool explosions. But what interested me even more was what the character was thinking in those moments. How were they making decisions? What was happening underneath all of that?

To most readers, the military side of things already looks awesome on the surface. But I kept asking myself: what if we looked beneath that? What made this person become who they are? What did they lose, suppress, or survive to function the way they do?

That’s where the story became more interesting to me. When you start exploring the psychology behind the “hero,” you create a very different experience for the reader. The action still matters, but now every decision, reaction, and relationship carries weight behind it.

Adrenaline Rush handles heavy subject matter — abuse, violence, grief, PTSD — without softening it. What is your responsibility to the reader in a book this dark, and how do you think about that while writing?

I think about all the women and men I served with who never got the chance to tell their stories. These things happen, and I don’t think people always realize that military members had lives before the military, just like they have lives after it. Service changes people, but it doesn’t erase who they were before they put on the uniform.

Part of my responsibility to the reader is writing these issues in a way that doesn’t sugarcoat them while still remaining respectful. I don’t write trauma for shock value, and I don’t glamorize the darker parts of military or veteran life. I write about real issues that happen every single day within the veteran community—PTSD, addiction, survivor’s guilt, broken relationships, identity struggles, and the mental shift that comes with living in survival mode for too long.

Whenever someone asks about my books, I’m honest with them. If they’re looking for a clean-cut military thriller that avoids those realities, then the series probably isn’t for them.

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