The Dead Kids Club follows grieving parents as they seek revenge against the son of the city’s most notorious mobster. What was the inspiration for the setup to your story?

This story was actually inspired by a dream—or rather, a nightmare. I dreamed that my son had been killed, and my ex-wife and I decided we were going to kill the man who had killed him. When I awoke, the emotions I felt were still with me, so much that I wondered if my son was really dead. Once I convinced myself that he was okay, and it was just a dream, I was struck with the idea for a novel surrounding the powerful emotions of parents who have lost their children—especially if there was a specific person responsible, and they had somehow escaped justice. I imagined what it would be like to participate in a support group for grieving parents, knowing that you had secretly exacted justice for the killer of your child, but there were so many other parents who would never feel that sense of completion… unless you helped. I won’t go any further (spoilers), but the story was so vivid to me, I knew it was a book I could write—that I needed to write—to fully process those emotions I took with me out of that dream.

Your characters are intriguing and well developed. What were some driving ideals behind your character’s development?

Much of the protagonist comes from me. The story is told in first person, so I’m driving the story, drawing on the emotions left over from the dream. I think of this story as an everyman thriller. That is, ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. I worked for a time in an I.T. environment like the one the main character in employed in, so I was able to draw on that experience to answer the question: “How would an ordinary I.T. guy go about planning a murder?”

The members of the support group were a challenge. As a parent, I cannot imagine a greater grief than the loss of a child. And creating a roomful of them for those scenes, especially when they told their stories, was tough. I had to try to imagine myself in that situation. As the characters in the story make clear, it isn’t something you can know unless you’ve gone through it. So, I hope I got close to what that kind of heartache does to people and relationships. It’s a big part of the story, and when I was narrating the audio version, I couldn’t help but choke up during some of those scenes.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

The tagline for the book is, “When we set aside our better angels to let loose our inner demons, there’s no turning back,” is the key theme. The protagonist is driven by grief and hope to motivate and justify his actions, but crossing that line, taking another human life, changes you and your circumstances forever.

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

My next book in this loosely connected collection of everyman thrillers is The Tenth Ride. It’s not as dark as The Dead Kids Club, but does also deal with a protagonist who is thrown into an extraordinary situation when he’s trying to make some extra money between jobs as a rideshare driver, and is seduced by an offer that is too good to be true, catapulting him into a deep, dark world of international intrigue. It also features a character from DKC, Eddie Horne, the Luddite crime reporter. He was a character I felt worthy of a repeat appearance and in the future his own stories.

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