Raffel says the idea for the novel came to him while having dinner with his friend Brian Rosenthal. They were talking, "jumping from topic to topic like stones skipping on a pond" when Raffel had an aha! moment. "I just saw Brian last weekend and he's going nuts. He can't remember what he said that prompted that 'aha!' moment. He asked how much of Smasher he has to read to figure out just what he said that inspired the plot turn. Everything but the last three pages, Brian."

Raffel and his returning character, Ian Michaels, have a fair amount in common, although Raffel may be even more colorful than his protagonist. Raffel once served as counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, worked on legislation with Senators Biden (now Vice President), Kennedy, Goldwater, and Bayh. He ran for Congress in California, an experience he compares to jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. "No matter how much fun the ride was, what you remember is the ending. Splat. I lost." From there he went to work in a Silicon Valley high tech company, then he did a startup company involved in cloud computing called UpShot Corporation, which he later sold to Siebel Corporation. Now he's a full-time novelist.

 "Colorful, Mark?" Raffel says. "Just an inability to hold on to a job, I'm afraid." Still, he admits that Ian and he live in parallel universes and his experience working in Silicon Valley is integral to his Ian Michaels novels. "While Ian has more than his share of imperfections, it's fun to be someone who's smarter, better looking, more attractive to women than I am."

His upcoming works are inspired by a trip to Israel he took with his son and a trip he took to the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. "We sifted through the archives and came up with the kernel for another thriller that I want to give a try."

When he's not otherwise working on upcoming projects that seem to draw from his experiences with the Senate Intelligence Committee, he's doing some touring with fellow ITW member, Libby Fischer Hellmann, whose new book, Doubleback, is also just coming out. He's hitting the bookstores and giving talks, but his primary focus is on California. He recounts a "hand-selling" story from his promotion for his first novel, Dot.Dead. "At Kepler's in Menlo Park, California, a bookseller bet me I couldn't sell 100 copies of my last book, Dot.Dead, that way. It took better than half a day, but I won the bet."

One guesses that it's a bet Raffel will continue winning.

 

Mark Terry is the author of the Derek Stillwater thriller series. His newest thriller, THE SERPENT'S KISS, is available in stores and online.