About

The short version: I write crime thrillers, and I think we're a lot closer to the people in them than we'd like to be.

My first foray into writing was as a musician and a poet, which is a lovely thing to be and a miserable thing to get paid for. Somewhere between being broke in New York and slightly-less broke in Philadelphia, working every odd job you can think of and being tired of living the starving artist trope, I made peace with a hard fact:

There's no money in poetry or music (at least for me), but there's a living to be made in a good story. So I taught myself to write genre fiction (still am, honestly). I'm still a poet about it. I just hide it better now, you could say.

What I love to read, write, and watch is the thriller genre. Fight Club, Inside Man. I've always enjoyed the stories that walk a moral grey line, where the good-guy and bad-guy roles are sometimes one and the same.

I also admire and was enthralled by the ones with real weight to them, Sicario, End of Watch, The Bourne Identity, You Were Never Really Here.

My dad kept a shelf of detective novels and I've read (almost) every one on it, and somewhere in there I worked out that crime thrillers are just the fastest way into the part of people that's worth exploring.

What I keep turning over, and the idea underneath everything I write: nobody is born good or evil. Goodness is a lot more circumstantial than we like to admit.

As much as it can be difficult to look at, most of the people sitting in prison (yes, even maximum security) aren't monsters. Sure, those do exist. But they're the small minority.

What's far more common are the people who did a monstrous thing, usually not planned, in a second of bad judgment, that swallowed the rest of their life.

That's a prickly thing to say out loud at a dinner party. I'll say it anyway. It's the truest thing I know about us.

So that's the thesis behind my books and Split Second. Short reads about the moment everything tips, and what it says about the rest of us. Usually with a psychological twist (or two) to keep the pages turning.

If one ever makes you feel seen, or a little unsettled about how thin the line really is, well, then I did my job.

Glad you're here.

Kia