Linda Richards: October 2009 Archives

Here's how it happened: author Michelle Gagnon was having dinner with a veteran FBI agent. They were discussing domestic hate groups -- domestic terror outfits like the one that spawned Timothy McVeigh.

Gagnon's FBI alumni friend told her that the thing he found most frightening was the fact that groups like that had doubled in size over the past decade, but that since 9-11, the resources previously used to watch them had been reallocated to foreign terrorism.

So now there were twice as many of those guys out there, Gagnon's friend said, "and no one is watching them. And now all these groups share the same agenda: they're all anti- immigration. My biggest fear is that someone will manage to galvanize them."

Somewhere in all of that, a light bulb went off, the muse struck and Gagnon went to work. The book that resulted is fictional FBI agent Kelly Jones' third novel and it's in stores this month. "In The Gatekeeper," says Gagnon, "someone does galvanize them. And the resulting terror plot, if it succeeds, would mark the worst attack in American history."