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Author Steve Hamilton talks latest crime thriller

Steve Hamilton
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http://authorstevehamilton.com/books/exit-strategy/

New York Times bestselling Author Steve Hamilton will visit Petoskey on Thursday to promote his latest book Exit Strategy.

The book is the second in a series about Nick Mason, an ex-con who has taken an unusual deal.

Ben: Tell me a little bit about this book, where are we when we start?

Steve: In the first book you meet this character Nick Mason who is a car thief, he was holding up drug dealers for a while. He has been released from prison and he doesn’t just walk out of the front gate of the prison he actually walks out into a whole new life. He has this town house on the lake, a beautiful roommate, and a mustang to drive around and ten thousand dollars cash at the end of every month. So on paper it’s everything a man could want.

But the first book is really about him finding what the cost of this is because part of this deal is whenever the phone rings 24 hours a day 7 days a week he has to go do what he is told. No matter what it is. As the second book opens up, Exit Strategy, the assignments are becoming more and more dangerous, more and more brutal, and he’s starting to feel inside of himself that he’s turning into something he doesn’t recognize, he’s becoming a machine.

Ben: Talk to me about writing a character who is a criminal and who is a murderer but still making him likable and making him someone people can root for.

Steve: That was the challenge of this series. It’s not something I would have tried years ago. Nick Mason, it was a real interesting experiment to see if I could make him someone you could root for. From the first page you know who he is and you know what he has done. There’s no excuse about that. But when he takes this deal to walk out of prison he does it so he can do his family again, so he can see his wife, so he can see especially his daughter. That I hoped would start to give him this basic human drive that anybody could relate to. That’s something we would all want to do.

Ben: So there’s a really - it was half a second in the book. Officer Sandoval the detective is going into the church chasing an african american man and has a brief thought about the optics of going into the church and shooting this unarmed man. Talk to me about the decision to put that into the book and the layering of realism into a book that is in a lot of ways larger than life.

Steve: Part of setting this in Chicago is being aware of all the other things that are going on in that city. A great, amazing, wonderful beautiful city but with some real problems. It would be impossible not to let that bleed into the plot a little bit. In his case Sandoval is a Chicago homicide detective who is very similar to some of the guys I’ve met myself and talked to. I know how hard that job is to do even before all these things started to happen in the last two or three years. The cops are suddenly feeling like a lot of people in the city are considering them to be the enemy. It was something I couldn’t avoid, a moment like that when he’s chasing a man into a church, an unarmed man, there’s just been too many case of unarmed men, black men, in Chicago being gunned down.

So he has to think about it. Any cop would think about it. Because that makes you hesitate and it puts you in danger.