Deadly Dial follows a radio host who takes a chilling late-night call that opens the door to a civic nightmare. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

When I began developing the novel, the country was on the verge of another government shutdown. Approximately 1.4 million people (670,000 federal employees and another 730,000—including personnel from the TSA, NASA, OSHA, and the EPA) were forced to work without immediate pay. With roughly $14 billion in wages temporarily withheld, localized consumer spending collapsed. The politicians orchestrating this crisis appeared entirely insulated from its fallout, detached from the reality of citizens struggling to afford basic necessities.

Simultaneously, public discourse was fracturing; people grew increasingly brazen, invoking their First Amendment rights while remaining blind to the consequences of their words. While no single event inspired this book, the collective anxiety and social friction of that era heavily shaped the narrative. This atmospheric tension is also why I chose to leave the setting unnamed—I wanted to capture a universal cultural climate rather than anchor the story to a specific location or headline.

Were there particular crime novels, political scandals, or media events that influenced the book?

Although I intentionally steered clear of writing the story based on direct current events, reality had a way of bleeding into the pages. A mere week into writing the manuscript, a well-known conservative commentator was assassinated during a Q&A session on a university campus as he fielded questions about violence. Ironically, he was a man of faith who prided himself on unfiltered speech, and his sudden death served as a chilling, real-time validation of what I was exploring in my fiction. It proved, in the most tragic way possible, that our current culture of reckless speech carries heavy, sometimes fatal, consequences.

Did you want readers to fear the Prophet as a person, or as a symptom of something larger within the city?

I wanted readers to fear the Prophet as a symptom of a much larger, systemic issue within society. On a personal level, the Prophet simply mirrors the dark realities we see every day: politicians driven by corruption, self-interest, and a complete disregard for the “ordinary person.” The true horror stems from the reality that, in our world, these figures rarely face consequences for the devastation they cause. In my novel, however, that immunity is stripped away. While I am certainly not advocating for real-world assassination, within the heightened dramatic stakes of the book, these corrupt actors are finally exposed and forced to face the ultimate reckoning for their actions.

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

Writing has truly become something I simply cannot put down; creating these worlds and sharing them with readers is incredibly therapeutic and fulfilling. Right now, I am juggling several exciting projects. I am currently finishing a medical-dental suspense thriller titled A Deadly Extraction. Additionally, I have three completed, fully edited novels ready to go for The Dante Villehart Files series, along with a few standalone projects. My main focus right now is deciding whether to continue down the self-publishing route or pursue traditional publishing for these next releases. Either way, there is a wealth of new material coming very soon!

Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Amazon