Broken Shields is a crime thriller in which Internal Affairs detective Kat Booker investigates the murder of a friend and uncovers a web of corruption, predation, and buried truths. What were some sources that informed this novel’s development?

Broken Shields was shaped by a mix of real-world cases, crime fiction, and an interest in the gray areas within law enforcement. I kept coming back to stories where the line between “good cop” and “bad cop” isn’t clear. It shifts.

I was especially drawn to stories about internal investigations, where the protagonist is forced to turn inward and investigate their own department. Films like Internal Affairs explore how deeply corruption can take hold, and how personal the pursuit of truth becomes.

More broadly, I was influenced by procedurals that lean into psychological tension—where solving the case isn’t the hardest part. At its core, Broken Shields came from a simple question: what happens when doing the right thing means tearing down the system you’ve sworn to protect?

How did you balance the procedural side of the novel with its deeper focus on grief and moral injury?

I didn’t treat them as separate tracks. The investigation is how Kat processes grief. Every interview, every report, every decision forces her to confront what she’s lost and what it’s cost her to stay in the job.

The procedural side gives the story structure, but the emotional weight comes from what those steps mean to her. I was less interested in how a case gets solved and more in what solving it does to the person doing the work. In Internal Affairs, you’re not just chasing a suspect. You’re turning on your own. The job demands detachment, but the closer Kat gets to the truth, the harder that becomes to maintain.

Tideview feels vividly damp, decayed, and compromised. Was the setting inspired by a real place, or did it emerge entirely from the book’s themes?

Tideview was born from my time living in Vallejo, with Mare Island sitting there in a kind of quiet decay after the Navy pulled out. That image stuck with me. This place that once had purpose is now slowly deteriorating. I started to imagine what it would look like if an entire city grew up around that very foundation.

The environment mirrors what’s happening inside the department. Nothing collapses all at once. It’s erosion. Structures left unattended and problems ignored. The dampness, the decay, it all ties back to the idea that corruption isn’t explosive. It’s slow, it’s tolerated, and at some point, it simply becomes part of the system.

The novel is skeptical of institutions while still caring about justice. What were you most interested in exploring about that tension?

What interested me wasn’t just corruption. It was how it survives. Institutions tend to protect themselves first: reputation, control, continuity. Justice is disruptive. It threatens all of that.

Kat sits right in the middle of that conflict. Her job is to hold the system accountable, but doing that makes her a liability to it. The tension comes from the fact that justice isn’t clean or rewarding. It isolates you. It costs you relationships. And sometimes it doesn’t fix anything. It just exposes what’s already broken.

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