Avonna Loves Genres

Book Description

After rescuing a teammate from a covert detention facility in East Asia, it’s back to business as usual for John Dempsey and Task Force Ember: conducting counterterrorism operations in denied areas.

An opportunity to strike a master Houthi drone engineer sends the team to Yemen, but things start to go wrong almost as soon as their boots hit the ground. What is their local contact hiding, and why didn’t their CIA contact show up to the rendezvous? Meanwhile, First Lady Petra Jarvis’s job—juggling the roles of wife, first lady, and Ember liaison—is about to get a lot harder. The Presidential Election is only two weeks away, and President Kelso Jarvis’s SEAL instincts are failing him. Good in the heat of battle and in the situation room, Jarvis is floundering in debate prep, allowing his political rival to paint him as a caricature of the war mongering, hot-tempered SEAL.

What neither Petra nor Dempsey know is that they are both in the sights of a master spy operating right under their noses in DC—a spy with orders to sow chaos. As Election night nears, Dempsey and Petra are drawn further into his web, and soon it’s hard to tell who is manipulating whom.

A dangerous game is afoot, and to win Dempsey and Ember may well be forced into a bargain with the devil.

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Elise’s Thoughts

Insurgent by Andrews & Wilson has everything readers love about these stories including fast-paced action, suspense, and an intense plot with a level of realism that makes people think these authors have a crystal ball. 

The plot has John Dempsey and the Ember task force having an opportunity to strike a master Houthi drone engineer in Yemen. It appears that Task Force Ember’s technology might have been infiltrated by foreign adversaries leading to a cat and mouse between Ember and a psychotic Chinese operative who has grandiose plans to strike massive blows to the United States and Dempsey personally. Meanwhile, First Lady Petra Jarvis’s job of juggling the roles of wife, first lady, and Ember liaison puts her in danger.  

High stakes, geopolitically and personally, with life and death consequences has Petra and Dempsey intent on finding the Chinese agent and making sure he fails. Readers will be on the edge of their seats as the tension level builds. 

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Author Interview

Elise Cooper: What is new on the television front? 

Brian Andrews: We have a project over at Amblin Entertainment, which is Steven Spielberg’s company. We’re excited about that. It is based on one of the short stories that we have coming out later this year. We’ve had a little bit of musical chairs with the showrunners for the “Shepherd Series” and “Tier One.” We’re on the hunt for our third showrunner for the Shepherd series right now. Still hoping that that will get some movement. We’re interviewing a showrunner for another series called Strike Group that we’re developing, which is about an aircraft carrier, a mystery. 

EC: How did you get the idea for this story? 

BA: Insurgent is book ten in the “Tier One series” and felt like it is an important book. It was time to circle back almost like an anniversary. We circled back and revisited some of the themes that we introduced in the first book. I think the savvy reader will pick up on that right out of the gate. It opens in Yemen, where Operation Crusader went down with John Dempsey losing his team, which is when Jack Kemper became John Dempsey. He hasn’t been back to Yemen since the Jabouri base was blown up. And, so for him, this is a homecoming, an emotional one, because he’s coming back to this place where it all started. This is why we kicked off the book here. 

EC: But the Chinese play a major role in the story? 

BA: The world is now interconnected. The Yemenis aren’t just making their drones and their anti-aircraft systems and missiles by themselves. It is not happening in a vacuum. They’re getting help when they’re getting supplied by the Chinese and they’re receiving aid from the Iranians. We’re starting to see that the Chinese, especially over the last five years, are becoming a defense contracting hub. They’re building drones, missiles, and helicopters. They have a guidance system. They’re starting to export the types of products and weapon systems that were previously only in the purview of the United States. Soviets, and the European defense contractors. Now they’ve got a foot in that game. 

EC: Does the title mean anything? 

BA: It is the origin. We think of an insurgent as an assaulter or somebody who’s coming at you on your home turf with a gun. This title is sort of metaphorical. We’re dealing with a more complicated insurgent. We dealing with a Chinese effort to infiltrate American defense, industrial complex, and our politics on multiple levels. 

EC: The structure of this book is different? 

BA: We’ve never done this before. in any of our novels. And we were excited and curious to see if people recognize the flash forward open, and then what people think of it. The book is started at the end, and then we come back and bring you back up to that point. You see all the events that led up to the climax.  

EC: How would you describe Ren, the Chinese agent? 

BA: He is evil, a threat, a psychopath, manipulative, adaptable, sadistic, and loves chaos. This antagonist has got a screw loose. And so that’s something else that we haven’t really explored since Malik, the Russian Zeta, part of the secret Russian task force. He was a little bit sociopathic and on the edge. He went against Dempsey in Red Specter, that was book five. 

EC: It’s like the story has a word of warning about the Chinese? 

BA: Before, we could exert a certain element of control over bad actors, by depriving them of access to arms and technology. Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, along with terrorist organizations if they couldn’t develop them, their weapons in house, or buy them from the Russians, or get them off the black market, they couldn’t get them. And now the Chinese are happy to supply them with weapons, but not just weapons. It’s not just guns, it’s technology and guidance systems along with drones, engines, and components they couldn’t make themselves. 

EC: There is a book quote that says it is hard to kill only with air strikes. Can you explain? 

BA: There’s going to be people who are going to question the value of special operations, of teams like our fictional task force, Ember, and operators, like John Dempsey, who must go in on the ground to execute missions and deny areas. People question, why should we take the risk? We can just drop bombs. We can launch a missile, we can blow up their warehouse, or target the home where the guy lives. But just look at Iran. It’s clear the regime is still in control. We could bomb them into oblivion, and if they’re hiding underground, and we don’t have any boots on the ground, we don’t eliminate the regime, the regime will rise again. I think we’ll always have to have boots on the ground whether they’re overt or covert. 

EC: Can you explain the book quote, “politicians were the easiest adversaries to manipulate because they lacked principles and acted only in their own self-interest.” 

BA: Our goal was to be apolitical in these stories and not pick a side, but we live in a policy driven world, in the geopolitical world. I think it’s okay for characters to call out certain frustrations that we the authors are observing in real life. In American politics that’s driven by self-interest and power. The way that our politicians can change their opinion, and their votes on a dime should be concerning to people. You elect somebody based on what you perceive to be their platform and how they convey to you their belief systems and you’re doing that because you’re hoping that that person will represent you, the voter, and the constituency’s interest when it comes to making important decisions. And then they get in office, and you realize, oh, they don’t care. That was all just a bunch of gaslighting. They just said what they thought they needed to say, and what the voters need to hear to get elected. Then they get in there, and they do what they’re told, or what money buys, or whatever. And I think that this is something that we’re all seeing that politicians are maybe emboldened to even not hide it anymore, because there’s no consequences in their behaviors.  

EC: Do you have wishful thinking when you put this quote in by President Jarvis? “I don’t make decisions based on the political climate polling. Whatever the pundits may or may not want or criticize me.” 

BA: I think it’s very clear, and should be clear to anyone who reads this book, that President Jarvis is the president that we all want. And President Jarvis is the type of president that all presidents should aspire to. It should be an act of service to be President of the United States. It should be a burden. It should be difficult when you should have sleepless nights because you’re having to put the needs of the country ahead of your own. And as president, you should have to serve your entire constituency. that means people who don’t agree with you on everything that you say. In the Tier One series we want to entertain. But also, we want to present characters who represent a higher purpose. They should be models of heroism. People who do the right thing, do the hard thing, and put country, mission, and team before self. 

EC: What’s the importance of First Lady Petra? 

BA: She had a military, and an intelligence career. She was chief of staff to the DNI, who was Jarvis. She’s the president’s sounding board, confidant, knows national security, and a woman of action. What the US has never had is a First Lady who came from a background of military service or in the intelligence community. Because in her mind, she brings something different to the table. Jarvis needs her. He appreciates her counsel and her input. She is sort of a counterbalance to him, especially with his Parkinson’s now. Petra would say, ‘I’m going to do both. Why do I have to limit myself? You know, why can’t I be the first lady and continue to be Petra.’ So that’s kind of what we did in this book, her refusing to be put into a box and told that you must do this, because that’s what all the other first ladies did. And there’s this expectation, I hope we communicated in the text, in the story, there’s an expectation that she will behave and be quiet, and go off and do the things that other first ladies do.? But she is not going to do that. She’s supposed to function as the shadow firewall between Director Casey of Tier One, and the Office of the President, to provide a certain level of possible deniability and keep Jarvis at arm’s length from the operation of the task force. The exact role that he filled for President Warner. What we started to put into that subplot in this book is this idea that Jarvis is struggling to give up power and knowledge, the task force decision making. She calls him out on it saying, ‘This was your idea. So, you know, you can’t, you can’t have it both ways. You gotta pick.’ And he lets her be in charge and make the decision making.  

EC: The next books?  

BA: The next Tier One, book 11 we have not thought about yet. And have not written another Shepherd book. 

The next Sons of Valor is what we’re writing right now, starting a new trilogy. It will take “Chunk” Redman, who leads a covert team of elite operators, and Whitney Watts, and the Gold Squadron south of the border, where they’re going to be up against Mexican cartels for the next 3 books. It is titled for now, Sons of Valor 5 and will be out sometime next year.  

But we do have a book coming out in November titled Dark Horse. It is a standalone novel. It’s a sort of a modern retelling of Three days at the Condor. It’s about a secret program that the CIA runs where they have a think tank, and the members of the think tank come up with predictive scenarios about things that our adversaries could do. And they feed those scenarios into the analysis machinery of the CIA. And they get discovered and targeted by bad guys with everyone getting killed except one person. And that character is Eva Dasher, and Eva is on the run, being hunted, trying to figure out who’s responsible for this.  

We are also writing a short story every month, for the entire year. The first short story was released last December, titled First Ranger. And then we did one a month since. Each of these stories was written to be a potential vehicle that Anderson/Wilson could develop for film and television. It gives our readers and listeners a preview of some non-Tier One and Sons of Valor projects that we’re trying to develop for TV and movies and features. They’re completely different. First Ranger is historical. fiction. It’s the story of Thomas Knowlton, who was America’s first army ranger. He’s a real guy, but we fictionalize the story about how he was recruited by General Washington to form America’s first special forces unit, which were known as Knowlton’s Rangers, covert operations in 1776. Another example is Sledgehammer, that has a retired ground branch operator, Matt Holland. This is a story about a guy who’s retired. He’s in his early 70s and realizes that his daughter who he thought died is still alive. He puts together a team from his past, and they go into Syria to rescue her.  

THANK YOU!! 

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BIO: Elise Cooper has written book reviews and interviewed best-selling authors since 2009. Her reviews have covered several different genres, including thrillers, mysteries, women’s fiction, romance and cozy mysteries. An avid reader, she engages authors to discuss their works, and to focus on the descriptions of their characters and the plot. While not writing reviews, Elise loves to watch baseball and visit the ocean in Southern California, with her dog and husband.

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