In most thrillers, heroes risk their lives for the greater good—been there, read that. The interesting question is: Does everyone deserve saving? What about people who’ve lied to us? Would a hero risk everything to spare those who’ve done nothing but treat him badly?
Seeley James – 24 March 2023
The Back Flap
Jacob Stearne’s Top Secret mission to secure the nation’s future is thrown into chaos by his arrest for murder.
A group of young physicists sequester in Latvia to finalize a green technology worth trillions of dollars. Billionaires want to steal their work. While oil-rich nations want to destroy it. The president has tasked decorated veteran Jacob Stearne with bringing their research back to the US—which he intends to do as soon as he can break out of jail and beat a murder rap.
With an over-zealous police captain running the manhunt in dead-or-alive mode, Jacob is forced to find the real killer while fleeing the law. With ambiguous help from a dubious crew comprised of a young stripper, a claimant to the Russian throne, and the naïve physicists, he quickly discovers: everyone lies.
As the Latvian dragnet closes in, and betrayals come from friends and foe alike, Jacob must rely on Stearne’s Law for survival: Paranoia is the result of acute situational awareness. To save the scientists and repatriate the research, Jacob must outwit a Russian oligarch. But this time, as he holds a bomb with a ticking timer, he may have run out of luck.
About the book
What is the book about?
It’s about the lies we tell ourselves to remain engaged when life comes at us like a steamroller. In this case, our hero, Jacob Stearne has been sent to retrieve a formula that could pave the way for cheap green energy. To eco-capitalists, it’s worth trillions of dollars but to the fossil fuel industry it must be destroyed. Win or lose, Jacob won’t be rewarded in proportion, so why bother? He does it for the others involved: the teenage stripper looking for a new life; the forgotten movie star who should be a world-renowned physicist; the college kids trying to save the world. They all lied to themselves that everything would turn out fine—then their adversaries came after them with a vengeance.
When did you start writing the book?
March 22, 2022. I keep a journal every day from beginning to end. On that day, I began reading a stack of books that contained elements of character arcs I admired. There are many books and movies that tackle existentialist theory, but none as a central plot. That day I began researching and forming the basis for the story.
How long did it take you to write it?
261 days, right up until December 8, 2022 (that journal comes in handy). That’s when my final-final-final edits went into the manuscript, and I emailed it to my formatter. Of course, later that day, I thought of 217 passages I could’ve written better. But at some point, you have to move on. Wait. Come to think of it, there was a better retort I could’ve used on page …
Where did you get the idea from?
I spend hours working on ideas. All my ideas start as situations from real life that I find interesting or troublesome. I then flesh out a plan to demonstrate how that concept can affect people’s lives. For example, in 2014, I wondered what if a pharmaceutical company engineered a pandemic so they could profit from the cure? That led to Element 42. Five years later, I got hate mail from people saying the Covid pandemic was my idea.
This time, I thought: In most thrillers, heroes risk their lives for the greater good—been there, read that. The interesting question is: Does everyone deserve saving? What about people who’ve lied to us? Would a hero risk everything to spare those who’ve done nothing but treat him badly?
Were there any parts of the book where you struggled?
I always struggle with the end of Act II. This sequence occurs in every story you’ve read, heard, or seen. A well-known screen writer named Blake Snyder called it, The Dark Night of the Soul. It’s when everything the hero worked for fails and he or she must face the consequences of that failure.
The best example of this is the scene in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back when Han Solo and Princess Leah walk into a dining room and find Darth Vader waiting to take them hostage. From then on, it is a dark, soul-searching night.
The struggle-part isn’t because I’m lost. I struggle with it because when it’s done badly, you hate the story. But when it’s done well, you love it.
What came easily?
A new character who was supposed to be a sacrificial lamb flowed onto the scene and became a larger part of the story. I was working out how this hapless teenager would die when a news article caught my eye: There are now more than 250,000 survivors of school shootings in the USA. That’s 1,000 times more than any other country in the world. What if this character were one of them? How would that trauma affect one’s outlook on life? Would they trust authority figures? Would they ever feel safe? A couple hours later, the character had a whole new role and the words flowed like a swollen stream in spring.
Are your characters entirely fictitious or have you borrowed from real world people you know?
All my characters are written from scratch using only the freshest ingredients. Some writers, like Janet Evanovich and James Patterson, rely on trope characters such as the Italian mobster making cliché threats, the Latino cop struggling to get out of the hood, the single mother with too much on her plate. And others use people they know for consistency such as the overbearing and semi-autobiographical father figure. I will observe what other people wear, how a parent interacts with a child, how lovers sneak a kiss, or how people argue when they don’t want to. But I never base a character on a trope or a real person.
Maybe the people I know aren’t that interesting. (If you tell my wife I said that I’ll deny it.) I make my characters work hard for their supper. They must have unpredictable moods, change their minds, make horrendous mistakes, get angry at the wrong times – you know, people like you and me. But using a real person as a model puts the writer in a straitjacket. My characters are galley slaves, they exist to do my bidding. They need to be consistent but surprising. Basing them on real people restricts how surprising they can be. I mean, did your mother ever slash the ambassador to death at the dinner table with a butterknife?
Do you have a target reader for this book?
My target audience is as broad as they come: Anyone who likes escapist adventure. When I started writing, I wrote books ending with battles royale or the annihilation of evil, but these days, I find clever resolutions more appealing. The final showdown in LIES is one of my favorites: instead of killing everyone, Jacob must pull a con-job, free the kidnap victims, out-flank the enemy, and defuse a bomb all at once. If you like to see the hero surrounded by an inescapable fate only to pull a rabbit out of his hat, you’ll love this one.
How was writing this book different from what you’d experienced writing previous books?
Each book I’ve written has been a completely different experience. Partly because I spend a good deal of time studying the craft of writing before I start (which should make me incrementally smarter about it). But mostly because I don’t have a hero with a repetitive job. From Hercule Poirot to Harry Bosch, from Sam Spade to Jack Reacher, literary heroes are after the same thing every time: spot a crime, figure out whodunit, stop ’em.
For Jacob Stearne, his mission is different every time, from figuring out how lobbyists are funneling foreign money into US campaigns in Death & Dark Money, to saving America’s future from international billionaires in LIES. I like to keep his circumstances and his goal changing from book to book. It keeps the whole experience fresh. From dreaming up a new concept to working out new ways to execute the plot nothing stays the same.
End of Interview:
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You can get your copy of LIES directly from the author’s sales site or from Amazon US or Amazon UK.
