The Graham Gage and Harlan Donnally novels are seeded not with actual people and events, but with the logic and meaning of the investigative life as I lived it.

It was a career that started in the crack houses and meth labs, in the mah jong parlors and biker bars, in the housing projects and the homicide scenes of the San Francisco Bay Area and eventually took me, among so many other distant places, to a smuggling port on the North China Sea, to a gambling den in Bangkok, to a prison in Lugansk, to an underground bank in Hong Kong, and into courtrooms in a dozen countries. It also put me in meetings with drug syndicates in the Golden Triangle, heroin traffickers in Pakistan, sex traffickers in India, corrupt police officers in Mexico, racketeers in Italy, snakeheads in Taipei, and fraudsters and money launderers throughout the world.

Eventually, the time came to toss my private investigator's license into a drawer and to turn from fact to fiction, from what happened to what if, from miles traveled to words written, and from scams investigated to stories told. On the international front the result is the Graham Gage series. On the domestic, Harlan Donnally.