The Devil’s Snow centers around a battered detective and former NYD cop and his new partner as they are drawn into a case that turns Tampa into a pressure cooker of grief and violence. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The inspiration for The Devil’s Snow comes directly from the asphalt. I’m a retired NYPD detective with over 20 years of service, having worked some of the city’s most crime-ridden sectors during the volatile decades of the 1980s and 1990s. Alex Archer is loosely based on my own trajectory from a uniform officer to a detective. When you spend two decades seeing the absolute worst—and occasionally the best—of humanity, those experiences don’t just leave you; they shape how you view the world. Dropping a character with that heavy New York baggage into a pressure cooker like Tampa allowed me to explore how a seasoned cop handles a completely different brand of chaos.

Archer often uses humor and sarcasm in dark situations. Why was that an important part of his character?

For a street cop or a detective, sarcasm isn’t just a personality trait—it’s a survival mechanism. When you’re constantly walking into crime scenes, dealing with violence, and seeing the rawest parts of human tragedy, you can’t carry that weight around with a straight face 24/7. Your mind would snap. Gallows humor is the armor cops wear to keep the darkness at bay; it’s a way to process the unprocessable with your peers so you can get back to the job. I wanted Alex Archer to have that exact defense mechanism because without it, he wouldn’t feel like a real cop. It grounds his humanity and gives him a shield to hide behind when the job gets personal.

How did you approach writing about the long-term effects of September 11th?

Writing about September 11th isn’t just a plot point for me; it’s deeply personal. As an NYPD officer during that era, I lived through the immediate devastation and the heavy, lingering shadow it cast over the city and the department for years afterward. In the book, I wanted to move past the immediate headlines and look at the slow-burning, long-term psychological toll. Cops are expected to be unbreakable, but events of that magnitude reshape your DNA. By filtering that trauma through Alex Archer, I wanted to show the quiet, exhausting burden of carrying that history with you, even when you try to leave the city behind.

Do you see Alex Archer returning in future stories?

Absolutely. Alex Archer will be back in a sequel titled Vanished Twin. It’s a psychological crime thriller that pushes Archer and his team into much darker, more twisted territory. They find themselves tracking a series of ritualistic murders tied to occult symbolism and a suspect suffering from severe dissociative illness. As they dig deeper, they discover the suspect believes he is controlled by a twin who vanished before birth. The investigation uncovers a history of abuse, cult manipulation, and fractured identity, leading to a shocking revelation: the twin might not be a delusion at all, but an equally dangerous presence hiding in plain sight. It’s going to force Archer to question everything he thinks he knows about a crime scene.

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