I wrote HOOKED, my upcoming thriller, out of nostalgia for my tribe and ye olde newsroom

often say, “I miss the newsroom,” a reference not only to the place where I used to work, but the feeling of camaraderie I found there with other reporters and editors.

I didn’t really appreciate it at the time, because I was still in the thick of it. But when I look back today at those 19 years of experience, spread over five newspapers and probably twice as many newsrooms, they stand out as a highlight of my nearly 40-year career as a journalist-turned-author. But what I really miss are the people. My tribe.

Though toxic at times, because of certain managers—they could be found at every paper I worked at—overall I still look back on the newsroom in a warm-glowy positive light. It was a place where I accomplished much to be proud of. As an investigative reporter, I exposed wrongdoing, incompetence and stupidity. People I covered actually feared me, because they

knew that if I was calling, they had something to worry about.

“Just don’t lie to me,” I’d say.

It was with great nostalgia and love for that time and collective experience of my life that I wrote HOOKED, the first in a series of thrillers that is now known as the “Katrina & Goode” series, which launches on February 1, 2026. The sequel, STAGED, is set for release on June 16. Both are available for pre-order now.

I set the series, which launches with HOOKED, in 2015, as historical fiction about a bygone era, a place, a time, and an industry that has been reduced to a much smaller scale. Based on a visit I made to a newsroom today, even those considered to be the “bigger” ones are maybe an eighth of the size of what they were when I was

still working as a reporter, with most reporters working remotely from home, or

in a hybrid situation. Across the country, many many papers have closed, been purchased, or have been downsized in mergers by private equity companies that have no interest in protecting democracy, only in trying to squeeze every last penny they can out of a industry that is holding on as best as it can with whomever is still standing, i.e., hasn’t taken a buyout or been laid off.

But let me go back to the beginning. Because writing crime novels has been a journey and a destination for me. And I’m reaching the second stop on that journey now after a good many years since the first, which started in a newsroom.

When I sat down to write the prequel to HOOKED, I was working as a reporter with six years of experience in a bureau of the Springfield Union-News in Northampton, Massachusetts. The novel, which was ultimately published with the title NAKED ADDICTION, started as a series of “germs,” as we called them, which came out of trigger exercises during writing workshops I took every weekend for a year.

At first, I didn’t think that I would have the time or energy to write after long days at the newspaper, where we churned out copy like machines. But the bug got to me. I found myself sitting up in bed scribbling in a notebook until 2 a.m., writing short stories that grew out of the germs. Those three-hour sessions unleashed a newfound creative energy and imagination I never knew I had. It was exciting and it was fun. The trigger exercises, which are aptly named, generated more ideas than I had ever expected.

It took me 17 years and many rewrites to finally get NAKED ADDICTION published in 2007, a year after I had actually left the newspaper business. I was thrilled to have that first novel come out, and immediately wrote a sequel.

My goal was to publish a series of crime novels with surfing detective Ken Goode as the protagonist, and a slovenly but passionate cub reporter named Norman Klein as his comic foil. But sadly that was not to be. My publisher rejected the book, saying I’d taken too long to write it. Unfortunately, other publishers my agent sent it to also rejected it, which was no surprise, because it’s always very difficult, if not impossible, to get a new publisher to pick up a series, unless you’re a famous, or at least established, author already, which I clearly was not.

NAKED was my third published book, the others being true crime, and it remained my only novel for 17 more years. It went through a whole journey of its own after the original publisher, Dorchester, went into foreclosure just as it was about to re-release the book as a trade paperback with a new cover that reflected my new New York Times bestseller status. Over the next two years, I managed to get my rights back and was happy to get a slightly revised version of it re-released by WildBlue Press in 2014. It is still in print today.

Still hoping for a series of crime novels, I completely rewrote and reimagined the sequel from start to finish. After going through many more versions, several more agents and countless rejections—and writing a good dozen narrative nonfiction books—the sequel now has a new title and is quite a different book.

HOOKED is now the first book in a new series, because it has two protagonists, the original surfing detective, Ken Goode, as well as a new female counterpart, investigative reporter Katrina Chopin.

I’m not going to go too much into the plot here, but let’s just say that both characters have different parts of me in them, and it was enormous fun to play them off and against each other. They are immediately attracted to one another, they respect and admire each other, and yet they are not allowed to be together, which creates a sexual tension and a conflict that makes for a good thriller.

I also want to tell readers, and my former coworkers in particular, that none of the characters in the book, including the newspaper owner-publisher, is based on a real person. They are compilation characters, inspired by people I’ve worked with over the years. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I started the series in 2015 because I wanted Katrina’s world to be in that newsroom, a place that no longer exists in the same form today, at a time when the newspaper business was transitioning from a paper edition to an online-first edition, and at a time when reporters could watch their editors arguing in their glass-walled offices. We called them the “glass holes.”

Today, the technology of producing a newspaper is different, some print editions have been phased out of existence, and the whole work flow, timing of deadlines, and schedule of when, where and how stories run is on a different track. But when I envisioned the characters, the setting, and the plot of this series, I pictured the days when I was still a reporter at The San Diego Union-Tribune. The paper in the book is called the San Diego Sun-Dispatch, and the newsroom is loosely based on our old one in Mission Valley, but I had to move the story forward a decade or so to the time when the business was transitioning to online.

The plots and the characters in this series—two books are under contract and the next two are under submission—come out of stories and people I covered during my 19 years as an investigative reporter, as well as the subsequent 19 years I’ve worked as an author, mostly of true crime.

But I do still miss the newsroom and the people, and this is my way of sharing my nostalgia about those days and those experiences with you.

Once you read HOOKED, I hope you'll be hooked on the series enough to order STAGED, or you can pre-order both of them now!