 “There was a message here, but the targets were random.” The title Illusion of Truth is intriguing. Just the title pulls a curious reader to want to find out where you might go with the plot and how the title will work as a theme. How did you settle on the opening event? And why was this theme important to you when writing this novel? The opening scene in Illusion of Truth starts with a bang. Sacramento police officers are lured to a church where they are caught in a bombing. The church intersects rival gang territory, and many are quick to place the blame on one of the gang factions who have been vocal about over-policing in their community. Everyone is on edge, and one wrong move on either side will ignite a powder keg. Protests spring up, and Detective Emily Hunter finds the bomb targeted first responders, including her cop boyfriend, Brian Conner. Someone wants the city to burn, and Emily rushes to find them before more targets are hit. There is a theme within Illusion of Truth that the truth might not be what it seems and may depend on who’s telling the story. Emily, fellow officers, gang factions, and community activists all have a lens through which they perceive the truth. It might not be as simple as they believe. Do you start with the themes you want to get across to your readers, or do they occur as a process in working the plot? I find theme is the connective tissue that moves the story forward. For Illusion of Truth, the idea of hot-button issues of defunding the police, crime, race, trust, and revenge came together for a powerful theme based in the distrust of the police by certain communities. Once the theme began to gel, I developed the characters who would inhabit that world, and only then did I begin to write the story. Without giving away spoilers, what did you most want readers to take away from this story? I think there are a couple of ideas I’d like readers to come away with. First is with Emily herself. She’s a woman working in a male-dominated profession. She’s had to endure harassment from men who don’t believe women belong on the job. She’s not only proved them wrong at every turn, she’s excelled in her challenging job as a detective while also serving as a caregiver for her mother with dementia. Trying to balance work and home is a challenge—something many of us can identify with. Second, in today’s world, we are constantly bombarded with half-truths or outright falsehoods from social media to the point where we don’t know what to believe anymore. Often, it’s the loudest voice that gets heard. With tensions growing all around us, we need to be a little like Emily and find the truth, and it might not be what you want to hear. Your background in law enforcement brings authenticity to your work and allows your work to be a wonderful police procedural novel. How much of your experience finds its way into your novels? You can’t help but pick up a few things spending twenty-nine years in prison. I don’t write dark, noir, prison stories, but some of those character voices just never went away. There have been events that triggered a story idea—the home invasion in Face of Greed, Emily navigating the homeless camps in River of Lies, and being lured into an ambush in Face of Greed, all had some origin story in working in the correctional system for nearly three decades. As a crime writer, how do you balance procedural accuracy with keeping the story moving? Great question. It’s always a balance. Most of the procedures in the day-to-day law enforcement are often designed to comply with statute or regulation. And It’s not very exciting. Lots of real-world procedures don't make it into the finished novel because, while they're accurate and true, they can be sleep-inducing stuff. Much of that gets cut away in revision because it doesn't keep the story moving forward. That’s always where the focus must be. How do you keep suspense building without giving away too much too soon? I like to turn up the pressure as the story unfolds. At first, the suspense is in place over an important point, but the stakes for the main character might not be life and death—a hit to their reputation, maybe, or a setback. As the story progresses, you reveal a bit more, and the character feels that added heat. Suddenly, the stakes are deadly, and one false move means it’s over. You can’t have your pedal to the metal all the time. Readers need a chance to breathe. That’s where a subplot, or B story, comes in. For example, Emily deals with her mom’s dementia, and her declining health has made it impossible for the older woman to live independently. Emily must grapple with “putting mom in a home” and what happens in those facilities in terms of care and neglect. If the scene rolls out correctly, it gives the reader a break from the chase of the crime Emily might be working on, but it also builds another form of pressure in another part of Emily’s life. Separately you feel a decompression when Emily gets away from the job, but then you realize her world has even more demands than before. A little suspense sleight of hand, perhaps? What has changed most about your writing process since your first novel? I think I’ve become more disciplined in my writing. I’m firmly in the plotter/outliner camp. When I first started writing, I was more of an organic, seat of the pants kind of guy. But I found myself floundering and writing myself into corners. I needed a roadmap to get me from point A to point B. If you take a trip from, say, San Francisco to New York, you're going to head in that general direction. Sure, you might make a detour in the Midwest somewhere to check out the world's largest ball of string, but you're heading East to your destination. That holds true for my writing, too. I want to know where the story will end. All the storylines, subplots, and twists need to end up there. I’m not wasting time writing chapters that need to be deleted because they got lost somewhere on a road trip to nowhere. If readers could understand one thing about law enforcement that television gets wrong, what would it be? Television rarely gets it right. DNA results aren’t available at the snap of a finger. Because television needs to compress the timeline for the program, law enforcement processes are shortcut, and an investigation takes time—not everything can be solved in 48 minutes. Also, television is great at making villains into larger-than-life criminal masterminds. Truth is, most aren’t—and remember, prison is full of criminals who failed at their job. What does a typical writing day look like for you? I’m a morning writer. The dogs, whom I’ve dubbed the Plot Hounds, make sure I’m up early. With their assistance, I’m at the keyboard by 5:00. I’ll write for a few hours in the quiet morning before the rest of the house comes alive with distractions. By 10:00 I’m done writing on the new project, so I switch over to the business side of the author game, with marketing, publicity, and noodling over what the next project might be. Finally, what's next? Are there more stories on the horizon that readers can look forward to? Thanks for that! Up next is the fifth book in the Detective Nathan Parker series, Darkness Falls. Thanks for the chat, James. I enjoyed this novel and look forward to reading more in the Emily Hunter series. Thank you, I do enjoy writing Emily and company. We’ll see what comes next. There are a couple of new stories in the pipeline… 
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