L.A. Review of Books interview
“Terrified and Exhilarated and Desperate”
I had a great time catching up with fellow thriller writer Chris Holm, author of The Killing Kind, one of my favorite books of last year. I talked to Chris and the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) about getting kidnapped, talking to special operations guys, and the scariest thing I did while researching Cold Barrel Zero. Here’s a little bit of the interview:
Cold Barrel Zero is chock full of cool tradecraft, weaponry, and next-level tech — some of which I’m sure the government would prefer folks didn’t know about. How’d you pull it off? What was the coolest thing you stumbled across while researching this book? What was the scariest?
I had a former thief as a protagonist in the first two books, so I spent a lot of time talking to people who are into physical security and lock picking, and for the heist book I worked with “red teams,” people who get hired to break into secure facilities to test their defenses. They’re often ex-military, which led me to the classified tools that are only available to US intelligence and military. That’s how I found out about the urban escape and evasion class, too.
My favorite gadget is a real one. Certain agencies and military teams have a universal skeleton key device that I describe in the book. I haven’t seen any other public mention of it, so that was fun to include. There is actually more open-source information on classified military and intelligence operations than there is good material on how criminals do their work.
The scariest thing that came up, scarier than getting kidnapped or stun-gunned, was giving the manuscript to some special operations guys to check out. There was no greater relief, and I was really honored, when I heard back from them that they liked it and took it on deployment and passed it around the platoon.