Blood Gilt follows a Salvadoran-born young man raised through exploitation and his father Jared’s cartel-adjacent empire as he is sent back to El Salvador to help secure a narcotrafficking arrangement. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?

Blood Gilt grew out of a shorter thriller featuring Alejandro as a conflicted antagonist. As I continued writing him, I realized he couldn’t be reduced to his actions alone. Who he is—and the things he becomes capable of—are inseparable from the political and family systems that shaped him, which required a much larger story.

As a psychologist, I’m interested in how political and social violence moves inward: into families, relationships, identity, and individual behavior. I’ve also long been fascinated by Cold War political history, which drew me toward histories I knew only in fragments—such as the role of U.S. policy in El Salvador’s civil war during the 80s and 90s. I wanted those larger historical forces and the long civilian aftermath to be experienced rather than explained, while still maintaining the momentum of a crime story. 

I was also interested in complicating the stereotype of narcotrafficking. In Blood Gilt, Alejandro’s white American father—a military veteran—is the architect of the smuggling enterprise. The criminal system is transnational, and so is the responsibility for it.

Jared is both a father and the architect of much of Alejandro’s suffering. How did you balance those two roles while writing him?

I did not want to flatten Jared into a conventional villain any more than I wanted to simplify Alejandro. Jared is capable of enormous brutality, including toward the people closest to him, but he also has a history, attachments, weaknesses, and his own personal decision-making logic. He’s even a military hero from some character perspectives.

His motives often stem from a (however twisted) sense of doing the right thing. He often understands himself as protecting his family, preparing Alejandro to survive, or doing what circumstances require. He’s not the villain in his own story.

That matters because Jared is also the most stable presence Alejandro has known. Whatever Alejandro feels about him, the bond between them is real. Jared raised him, provided for him, and taught him how power works. We repeatedly see Alejandro trying to differentiate himself from his father but making similar decisions, anyway. In this way, the novel reflects on how patterns of violence reproduce themselves, even when each generation insists it’s acting for different reasons.

How did you balance the momentum of a crime thriller with the slower emotional work of character development?

It was difficult, and it required a great deal of cutting. I wanted room for complicated conversations, changing relationships, and moments in which the characters reveal themselves indirectly, but those scenes still had to create pressure or alter the direction of the story.

I tried to intertwine emotional consequence and external conflicts or escalation within the same scene. A moment of bonding might also be a negotiation. A romantic encounter might expose manipulation. A political conversation might reveal something deeply personal. The goal was to move between action and consequence, especially during deeper introspection.

What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?

Along with Blood Gilt, I recently completed Bound to Burn, a psychological-thriller screenplay set after the events of the novel. It continues with some of the same characters, although it moves into different psychological terrain.

My next novel will likely further build on the events and relationships in Blood Gilt, though I am still determining exactly what form it will take. I have also been working jointly on a dystopian/sci-fi novel with my daughter. Ideally, I hope to release another book in 2027.

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