Address follows three sharp, secretive investigators as a campus murder tied to nanotechnology spirals into a geopolitical conspiracy threatening the President’s State of the Union. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

My inspiration was a negative inspiration. I noticed the lack of minority and female action characters in the literature who are also intellectuals (I am a Brown Belt in Taekwondo and fancy myself a developing scholar). I also noticed in the literature the marginalizing and trivializing of minority and female voices and achievements. I therefore set out to create larger than life minority and female characters who would in the end, save America.

Henry, Braum, and Camilla have very different voices and temperaments. Which character came to you first, and which was the hardest to write?​

Camilla came to me first because I am a young African-American woman, fluent in Spanish and a student of Hispanic culture. Braum was the hardest voice to write simply because I am not a male Navy Seal law professor in his mid to late 30’s. 

The novel balances grief, banter, violence, and political danger. How did you approach tone in a story that moves between personal loss and geopolitical stakes?​

That is a wonderful question. I didn’t think about it as I was doing it.  It seems that the following process happens for a lot of the writing that I have done. I simply put myself in the moment (inside the head of the character, the physical location of the character etc) and then the writing happens. The next time I write finds me in a different moment. The tone is therefore defined by the moment in the book that I happen to be writing about at that time. Once I’m done with Moment A, the next time I write, I will be in Moment B. I have never found myself trying to write in Moments A and B simultaneously.

The book has a very cinematic sense of escalation. Were there particular thriller writers, films, or real-world events that influenced its structure?​

The most important real world event that is relevant to the book is the political tension that exists between the US and Russia/China. That tension drives the novel. “A Few Good Men” is one of my favorite movies and I feature it in the book. Other than that, I wrote the book against a mental backdrop of a lifetime of watching the standard action thrillers (e.g., James Bond, The Avengers etc). I wrote the book in the hopes that it will be adapted into a movie.

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