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The Humor of Organizational Dysfunction
Agent Bigglesby: Not Dead Yet follows an 84-year-old former super spy who has been officially declared dead but who refuses to walk quietly into a life of retirement. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
One inspiration was simply wondering what happens to an iconic screen hero when in an advanced age? The original thought was an affectionate nickname of 0070 but age 84 seemed more appropriate. The more I thought about it, the more I also wanted to explore consequences from all the casual relationships. In addition, my father was a kind of inspiration in that I experienced him having a stroke and losing some faculties, and becoming even more inappropriate, and I still laugh at the things he and other immigrants say very casually that have become officially offensive. There was just a lot of material to mine. He even used the word exploit in its original sense, talking about mines, but it sounded so funny in recent years to discuss relatives that moved to Chile and decided to exploit the mines. He is no longer with us but I picture him having encouraged me to keep going with this project many times.
Were there particular spy novels or films that influenced the book?
Sure, mostly films: various James Bond films, Johnny English, Get Smart, and Austin Powers on the cinema side, and I grew up watching Get Smart, The Saint, and Mission Impossible, and made parodies of the latter 2 in high school. I also appreciate Spy Kids and others I’m not recalling just now. For novels I would have to say various manuals from Human Resources at various places I’ve worked. They were quite inspiring to take on the humor of organizational dysfunction and inhumanity, and caving to lawyers over common sense.
The novel embraces absurdity with remarkable confidence. How did you decide just how far to push the humor?
I appreciate that reception of the humor. I didn’t have any kind of meter other than my own experience in various organizations and in my work as a therapist. I have seen a great deal of silent suffering and it’s usually over the myriad of little absurdities we are asked to tolerate. Comedy is a way of relieving some pain. I hope readers will get a lot of relief from seeing their own experiences reflected in these characters and interactions.
What does the novel suggest about the difference between being cared for and being sidelined?
In my experience you can have two realities side by side, having to do with perception and where one stands. In retiring Herbert, no one is trying to hurt him, they gave him many chances to continue contributing. But at some point a person needs to bow out gracefully and focus on other things. It only seems uncaring because he refuses to accept his limitations as significant. I also often dwell on the theme of well-intentioned people still causing damage, and this applies to Herbert as well as to the agency he formerly worked for. In my experience as a therapist and human being, some people want an inordinate amount of empathy and sympathy and can be quite mistaken that people have not cared. Yet hopefully people take time to reflect and enjoy the positive things they still have access to rather than dwell excessively on what they have lost.
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What happens when one of the world’s greatest superspies struggles with retirement? Officially, he’s dead, of course, but for 84-year-old Herbert Bigglesby, a quiet fadeout at Sunset View Senior Living Community is not going well. He feels like a prisoner, no one believes his stories, and his once-honored sixth sense for danger is now ridiculed as paranoid delusion.
But he’s not wrong. His enemies are not all resting in peace or dementia. Soon he finds himself thrust back into his old world of high-speed chases, unusual alliances, and late-night adventures with gorgeous women, though staying up past 8:00 is hard to do!
With his past, present, and future all at stake, he flips the script and PT tables on what aging is all about. And he won’t suffer scammers lightly as he gathers his remaining wits about him and heads to the high seas for what is hardly a final slowdown.
Three Days in Hell
Three Days in Hell by Emilio Iasiello is a gritty crime noir thriller about Bobby Santos, a down-on-his-luck Bible salesman sent to the dying town of Helman as punishment for his own bad choices. What begins as a miserable work assignment quickly turns into something darker, stranger, and more dangerous as Bobby discovers a town ruled by corruption, fear, appetite, and ritualized violence. Helman isn’t just a setting. It’s a trap.
What pulled me in first was Bobby’s voice. He’s not noble, and he knows it. He’s cynical, funny, wounded, and often frustrating, but that honesty gives the book its bite. Iasiello writes him with the kind of rough-edged confession that fits the genre well. The prose has a sweaty, sunburned feel to it, full of cheap motel rooms, bad coffee, dust, liquor, and people who seem one bad decision away from ruin. Sometimes the descriptions run long, but I felt that was part of the book’s rhythm. The story wants you to sit in the heat. It wants you to feel boxed in.
I also found myself thinking about the author’s choices long after the plot moved on. The Bible salesman setup could have been played as a simple joke, but here it becomes something sharper. Bobby carries faith as merchandise, not belief, while Helman itself feels like a place that has burned through every moral language it once had. The book keeps circling ideas of guilt, temptation, power, and survival. Nobody in this story is clean. It makes the world feel honest in a grim way. Iasiello doesn’t soften the town or its people, and he doesn’t let Bobby off the hook either.
I would recommend Three Days in Hell to readers who enjoy dark crime fiction, noir thrillers, and stories about morally compromised people trying to survive places that seem designed to swallow them whole. It’ll work best for readers who like hard-boiled narration, bleak humor, corrupt small towns, and a slow descent into violence and consequence. It’s not light reading. It’s mean and strange, but it has a strong voice, a clear atmosphere, and the confidence to follow its own road straight into the fire.
Pages: 304 | ISBN: 1961504278
Lagniappe
Lagniappe follows Brock Beckett, a former Marine and covert operative who arrives in Destiny, Arkansas, hoping to return to the quieter life of a literature teacher, only to discover that Cissy Nelson, the teenage daughter of the town’s mayor, may be the child he was told had died years ago. What begins as a reunion story soon widens into a mystery-thriller shaped by military secrets, small-town loyalties, buried grief, and the dangerous remnants of Beckett’s past. Destiny may look like a modest Arkansas town of cafés, churches, ranchland, and school-board politics, but the book steadily reveals that even a peaceful place can become a firing line.
I enjoyed the way the novel balances domestic tenderness with tactical menace. Beckett could easily have been written as a simple hard-edged veteran archetype, but McLemore gives him bruised restraint, moral exhaustion, and a surprisingly literary mind. His conversations about Gone with the Wind and Giant are not ornamental; they show how he measures history, power, loyalty, and change. Cissy, meanwhile, brings warmth and velocity to the story. She is not just a lost daughter or a plot device; she is sharp, capable, and emotionally alive, the kind of character who can make a reunion scene feel dangerous because so much love is at stake.
The Blue Bird Café, the Nelson ranch, Miss Esther’s apartment, the Black church, the river country, and the town’s old family names give the book a lived-in texture. The prose leans into exposition and martial detail, but I found that density part of the book’s temperament. It wants to be both a family drama and a sniper-scope thriller, both Sunday dinner and classified after-action report. That combination gives the story its peculiar charge: a man trying to become ordinary again while everyone around him slowly learns how extraordinary, and how dangerous, he has been.
This book will appeal to readers who enjoy military thrillers, crime fiction, mysteries, small-town suspense, political intrigue, and family drama, especially when those genres overlap rather than stay in their lanes. Fans of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels may recognize the appeal of a dangerous, hyper-competent outsider entering a small community, though Lagniappe is more rooted in fatherhood, faith, and local belonging than Reacher’s lone-wolf drift. It is a story about second chances bought at a high price. Lagniappe is a hard-edged thriller with a homesick heart.
Pages: 347 | ASIN : B0FP47CSV8
There’s Holmes, in all his utter terribleness,
The Druggist centers around a vulnerable workingman who becomes an unwilling witness to missing women, fraud, and murder when he is hired to alter a predator’s hotel-pharmacy. What drew you to H.H. Holmes’s story?
I first read about H.H. Holmes’ Murder Castle not in The Devil in the White City, but in a book of short stories about Chicago’s seedy historical underbelly called Chicago by Gaslight: The Levee (red-light district), Haymarket Riots, etc. The Murder Castle just leapt off the page — to me, it was as classic a setting for a period horror work as the cobblestone London streets of Jack the Ripper, or Count Dracula’s castle from Bram Stoker.
Reaching the POV of the “vulnerable workingman” came from necessity: there are no heroes in the H.H. Holmes story. There’s Holmes, in all his utter terribleness, there are his victims, and there are his accomplices. This is probably why Erik Larson decided to put Daniel Burnham’s heroic White City story alongside Holmes’ for The Devil… I decided to make one of Holmes’ accomplices — in some historical accounts, his main accomplice — into an innocent. Ben is too busy struggling with his own problems to notice Holmes as anything other than a ticket to a better life. In the beginning, at least.
What did you hope to bring to the Holmes story that readers might not find in other books about him?
Firstly, I have found the vast majority of works about Holmes to be “let’s get matters straight about what really went on,” myth-busting, that sort of thing. I was interested in taking it the other way: submerging into the mythos of the time and place. The fact of the matter is, nobody knows exactly how many people Holmes killed, and to me that wasn’t the point anyway. And living in Chicago at that time introduced people to horrors every day — slaughtered hogs, filthy air, no agency for learning the whereabouts of a missing loved-one. It almost explains how people didn’t notice Holmes’ crimes for so long.
And, of course, everyone else paints Ben Pitezel as a degenerate creep unworthy of humanitarian consideration. But he was also a family man, and his family pays a nightmarish price for his involvement with Holmes. The benefits of conducting a drama from Ben’s POV were too irresistible to me, so I went with that narrative. I’m sure the Murder Castle purists will be able to explain all the facts I ignored.
This is, to my knowledge, the only account of the Murder Castle written in first-person. Some people told me I might have trouble writing it this way — some readers might get turned off — but I thought it was better than third-person in this one key area: the gruesome, horrid passages of what goes on, especially in the dungeon, have a warmth and feeling to them when Ben tells the story. In third-person, the reader is a sort of voyeur, and some of these episodes might feel cold and clinical. Anyhow, that’s why I chose to write it in that style. Plus, I got to channel my own inner-Mark Twain (without ever once using the n-word! haha).
How much research went into recreating the city’s atmosphere, industries, and social conditions?
Luckily, there is much written about this time period, both in regular textbooks and more colorful literary stories. The age of photography was also (barely) upon us, and this gave us snapshots of what things looked like (in black & white) back then. Hollywood also had its own obsession with Chicago, at least back in its early days. The nation’s first network of film studios was here in Chicago, so there was probably still some of that stockyards grit on those old producers when they started making films in LA.
In short, I didn’t have to do much; Old Chicago to this day stands for certain levels of vile criminal behavior and relatively primitive culture. It’s a pre-sold concept, and works that explore this realm often become very successful.
But I may as well credit the modern era of research, while I’m here. Things that would have taken me a week to find in a library now take minutes or even seconds, with how search-engine AI links together facts and details these days. It’s absolutely a revolution of access to pertinent data.
If you could ask the real Ben Pitezel one question today, what would it be?
Well, the “real” Ben Pitezel is not the subject of my book. Maybe I can answer this two ways: for the character Ben from “The Druggist,” I’d ask him, “Is this what you really want, or is this what people tell you you should want?” For the real-life Pitezel, I’d ask, “How can you sleep at night?”
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It’s the era of Jack the Ripper, of mean, polluted streets, derby hats, hansom cabs and curlicued mustaches. In 1890s Chicago, no one suspects Dr H.H. Holmes of being a serial killing psychopath, least of all his dutiful handyman, Ben Pitezel. Ben gets himself in Holmes’ good graces, assisting him on insurance scams, which helps Ben provide comfortably for his wife and growing family. But when a beautiful young blonde co-worker goes missing from Holmes’ shop, and especially when Ben witnesses Holmes’ torture dungeon in the basement of the “Murder Castle,” he begins to understand Holmes’ devious nature. But is it too late to stop him?
Meet Marco His Thought and Actions
Meet Marco: His Thoughts and Actions follows Marco Rubinetti as he walks out of Sing Sing Prison after serving ten years for rape, carrying little more than prison-issued money, old rage, and the conviction that he has been wronged. At first, the novel appears to be a reentry story: Marco finds a hotel, meets with his attorney, accesses a sizable trust, shops for clothes, hunts for an apartment, and relearns the textures of freedom in New York City. But the book darkens as his private grievance curdles into a mission. Marco begins researching rape cases, murder methods, poisons, disguises, and surveillance, gradually transforming from a man trying to rebuild his life into someone who rationalizes violence as a grotesque form of justice.
I found the book most compelling when it stayed close to Marco’s routines. The long attention paid to meals, taxis, clothing stores, bank visits, real estate appointments, and small domestic choices creates an oddly convincing carceral afterimage. Freedom, for Marco, is not abstract; it is a bed, a shower, a steak, a phone, a door that locks from the inside. That patient accumulation gives the novel its unsettling power because ordinary details sit beside increasingly sinister intentions. The prose is plainspoken and deliberate, sometimes almost ledger-like, but that flatness can work in the book’s favor. Marco’s mind does not blaze; it inventories.
My strongest reaction was discomfort, and I think the novel depends on that discomfort. Marco’s reasoning around abuse, consent, accusation, and punishment is disturbing, self-serving, and morally warped. The book places the reader inside that logic for a long time, which makes it claustrophobic rather than conventionally thrilling. The novel succeeds at presenting a protagonist whose danger comes not from sudden madness but from patient, practical, almost bureaucratic escalation.
This book will likely appeal to readers drawn to psychological thrillers, crime fiction, dark suspense, vigilante thrillers, and serial killer character studies. Readers who like the methodical menace of Dexter or the moral unease of Patricia Highsmith may recognize the appeal, though Lloyd D. L.’s novel is more bluntly procedural and more relentlessly trapped inside one man’s corrupted worldview. Meet Marco is a story about how grievance, money, and freedom can become a very dangerous kind of permission.
Pages: 422 | ASIN: B0G55XPZC9
Noir Tales Are The Modern Day Fairytales
Dark Side of Mercy centers around a private detective pulled into a case that begins as a missing persons case and quickly broadens into one of corruption, blackmail, and murder. What draws you to the noir genre?
Noir tales are the modern day fairytales. The genre allows me to explore the dark psychological themes that humans struggle with while they look for hope and redemption. There is a saying that the men and women in noir stories aren’t fallen angels, but weak people who’ve tumbled into the gutter. I like the struggle of those people often clutching at anything in hope of dragging themselves out of the gutter, but often failing.
The Arizona setting has a heavy, atmospheric presence—dust, heat, corruption, and isolation. How did place shape the tone and direction of the novel?
In the first novel, No Solace in Death, I used the heat to illustrate a sort of hell that the protagonist, Benjamin Thomas, feels that he is in. I believe the atmosphere should, in Noir tales, add discomfort to the protagonist’s struggle. In Dark Side of Mercy, I used the wind and sandstorms in the desert to convey the corruption underneath the facade of civility surrounding Benjamin, and that the facade will eventually disintegrate as quickly and easily as a sand dune in the wind.
Some scenes are deliberately uncomfortable and morally ambiguous. How do you navigate the line between realism and reader endurance in a story like this?
Noir is like Odyssyus crossing paths with doomed, unsavory, and broken characters in the underworld, except in noir the protagonist is, in many cases, more broken than the people he/she runs across. Every character in Dark Side of Mercy is morally broken in one way or another. How the characters react to their situation and environment determines their level of strength or corruptibility. I believe every reader of this particular genre expects to be made uncomfortable. Like it or not, readers are going along with the protagonist into the downward spiral and landing in the belly of the beast with him to witness the vulnerability and brokenness of every character they meet in the story.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available? Right now I only have one chapter of a novel that takes place in the 80s about a Korean man (child of a comfort woman) who owns and operates a small convenience store and witnesses a murder. I have a few ideas for other novels that are percolating in my mind right now. Some are darker than others, and require more thought before I can put them on paper. At this time, I have no date for my next novel.
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While unravelling the mystery, Ben falls for Linda Lundlum, Horatio’s daughter—a striking and alluring woman whose motives seem to be to protect her father at all costs. In a world where truth hides in shadows and every clue leads deeper into the city’s corruption, Ben’s only hope to solve the case may rest in the hands of a recluse Holocaust survivor.
Dark Side of Mercy is the follow-up novel to No Solace in Death. Douglas Herle’s complex noir tale delves into the nature of corruption, while exploring tragic characters living in a world where making moral choices may not be the right ones.
An Idea That Demands Attention
Pismo Beach Sniper follows a private investigator as a surf-trial shooting that nearly kills his son pulls him into a dangerous web of arson, federal secrets, old enemies, and revenge along California’s Central Coast. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration for each of my books has been a little different. For ALL THAT GLISTERS, it was reading Coma, a medical thriller by Robin Cook, and thinking to myself: If a doctor can write a medical thriller, why can’t a CPA write a financial thriller? For OCEANO BEACH BEDLAM, it was a drive along the shore of Oceano Beach, CA, and watching a guy on a tractor dragging a sand rake across the beach to clean up debris. For PISMO BEACH SNIPER, it was a working title—CowaBANGa!—a mashup of two popular exclamations that seemed incapable of being together: (1) Cowabunga!—surf slang for “Dude, that was Awwwwsome!”, and (2) BANG, the sonic crack of a high-powered rifle.
What each inspiration has in common is the germ of a preposterous premise—an idea that demands attention.
Here are the preposterous premises for each book in the Thad Hanlon & Bri de la Guerra Series:
ALL THAT GLISTERS — What if a secret audit of the U.S. gold stockpile by two surfing buddies found the gold was fake?
OCEANO BEACH BEDLAM — What if a teen surf legend was in the wrong place at the wrong time and learned of an impending eco-terrorism plot to blow up Moy Mell—the California Central Coast spiritual haven nestled in the dunes—to liberate it from desecration by ATVs and dune buggies?
PISMO BEACH SNIPER — What if a deadly sniper starts using local surfers, waiting for their next wave, as target practice?
Thad’s fear for Zael gives the mystery a strong emotional charge. How did you approach writing him as both a father and an investigator?
For the father side of Thad, I simply tapped into my own experience raising two sons. While I had the good fortune of a supportive wife to share the journey, there were still plenty of nights spent worrying about our boys—especially during their tween years, when sports, adventure, and growing independence seemed to present a new reason to worry every week. No parent survives those years without a healthy concern for their children’s safety.
For the investigator side, I drew on my professional training as a CPA, software developer, and college professor. I’m analytical by nature. I like patterns, puzzles, and problem-solving. I can be methodical to a fault and have been known to spreadsheet just about everything.
The challenge—and the fun—was bringing those two sides together. When Thad is investigating a case, he wants to follow the facts wherever they lead. When his son is in danger, he’s a father first. The tension between those roles gave the story much of its emotional energy.
The ocean feels almost like a character in the novel. What role does the California Central Coast play in shaping the story’s mood?
The Pacific Ocean is a moody presence. At times, she provides solace from the daily grind. A chance to take a dip, cool off, and catch a few waves. And at other times, when big weather rolls in and the swells kick up, she can be a cruel monster, lashing out with rip tides and pounding surf. In Thad Hanlon’s world, the ocean is simultaneously a source of comfort, danger, and wisdom. When life becomes complicated, he paddles out beyond the break. The rhythm of the waves helps him untangle the Gordian knot of mysteries he’s facing and decide what to do next. In that sense, the Pacific isn’t just a setting—it’s a trusted companion in the story.
The novel blends PI procedural, action suspense, family drama, and coastal noir. How do you balance those elements while keeping the story moving?
By ensuring tension in every scene. That’s the secret to keeping the story moving when you’re juggling multiple elements.
For each scene, I work from a cinematic framework inspired by Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!® approach to screenwriting. I start with a simple structure: where the scene takes place, what is happening, and—most importantly—the emotional arc of the point-of-view character.
From there, I focus on what really drives momentum: the conflict. Who wants what, what stands in their way, and what’s at stake if they fail. If I can clearly define Hero—Goal—Obstacles—Stakes, the tension takes care of itself and the story keeps moving.
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The shooter disappears, torching his hideout, leaving only questions in his wake. Random attack—or the first move in a deadly game? Why target young surfers? And is the marksman finished…or just getting started?
Urged by desperate parents, Hanlon and his sharp-witted partner, Bri de la Guerra, race to protect the kids as they train for the upcoming West Coast Championships. But as the detective duo close in on the sniper, they uncover a chilling truth: the surf team isn’t his ultimate target—and the nightmare is far from over.
This gripping thriller will keep you turning pages late into the night.
Gallows Humor
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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