War, Memory, and the Price of Staying Neutral

You're meeting Brellen Storm, a woman who's been with me for a long time. Through many iterations, but she's here. And she's not apologetic about herself. 

In Beneath The Storm, you get to see exactly who she is. Whether you like it or not. 

Here's the thing about Brellen Storm

She's not a hero at the start of this book. She's not trying to be.

She's a contractor. She takes jobs, she does them clean, and she doesn't ask questions that would make the job harder. That's not cowardice — it's survival strategy. Thirty years of it, refined down to instinct.

But Beneath the Storm kept asking me, while I was writing it, whether there's a point where staying out of something stops being neutral and starts being a choice with consequences. Whether the clean exit is ever actually clean.

Brellen lives in a world where an institution has been controlling, erasing, and rewriting the history of an entire people for a century. She knows enough to know it's happening. She's made a deliberate decision not to be the person who does something about it.

Then the job puts her in the same room as Senator Khol Tavish — a man who made the opposite decision — and suddenly her carefully maintained distance has a crack in it she didn't plan for.

I love writing morally complicated women.

Not antiheroes in the flashy sense, but women who have made choices that made sense at the time and are now standing in the wreckage of those choices trying to figure out what comes next. Brellen isn't wrong, exactly. But she isn't entirely right either. And the book doesn't let her — or the reader — off the hook on that.

The romance is the fault line. It always is in books like this. Because the moment Brellen starts feeling something for Tavish, she can't pretend the political is separate from the personal anymore. His fight becomes harder to ignore. Her past becomes harder to outrun.

If you're here for action and intrigue, this book has that. But if you stay for the question underneath it — what do you owe to a cause you didn't sign up for? — I think that's the part that'll stick with you.

Get your copy of Beneath the Storm