What prompted you to delve into this area of the thriller genre?
What prompted you to delve into this area of the thriller genre?
Great question. I’ve always been fascinated by the intersection of history, religion, and mystery—particularly those moments when the historical record leaves just enough unanswered to make you wonder, What if?
The Vatican was an irresistible setting because it sits at the center of nearly two thousand years of history. Its archives contain the records of popes, kings, wars, scandals, scientific discoveries, political intrigue, and some of the most consequential events in Western history. For a thriller writer, that’s an extraordinary amount of material to work with.
What interests me most, though, isn’t religion itself so much as history and the people who shaped it. I enjoy taking something that is genuinely historical—a document, an artifact, a controversy, a person—and asking where the established history ends and a plausible fictional story might begin. That’s really the foundation of the Vatican Secret Archive thrillers.
And once Father Michael Dominic, Hana Sinclair, and the rest of the characters began to take shape, the series became as much about them and their relationships as it was about whatever mystery they happened to be chasing. At this point, I suspect that’s a large part of what keeps me coming back to this world book after book.
