In the beginning…
December 1992. I was a mom at home, raising three kids and an assortment of dogs. My husband made training videos for the FBI Academy, so we knew a lot of FBI people and talked a lot about the FBI culture. One night, I had a particularly vivid dream. The next morning, I said to my husband, “What if an in-charge, door-kicking FBI agent found his world spinning out of control because the drug gang he was investigating kidnapped his son. What would he do?”
To his eternal credit, my husband replied, “That’s a great story. You ought to write it.”
To which I responded, “Who me?”
Yes, me. My thinking was this: I read lots of general market mystery/suspense books from authors like Grisham, Clancy, and Patricia Cornwell. They all had a philosophy, a worldview, from which they wrote. I wanted to write a book like that but with a Christian thread. Not preachy. Just Christians in a real world.
So Larry started taking me over to the Academy and introducing me to people, and they started teaching me about all kinds of things, like firearms, probable cause, “the fruit of the poisoned tree,” surveillance, investigations, and so on. I’d always say, “Don’t tell me anything secret!” and they didn’t. They let me sit in on new-agent classes, taught me about gangs and death-scene investigations, and I filled notebooks with what I learned.
And I started writing, every day for four or five hours, once Larry went to work and the kids went to school. Our “family computer,” was a Commodore 64. It was so slow, I’d push “save” and go brush my teeth. When Larry saw I was serious, he bought me a “real” computer. An agent named Amelia took me under her wing. When I got stuck, I’d call her, and she’d tell me what she’d do in the circumstance I was describing.
By the end of the year, I had a story on my hard drive. And not just a story, a believable, gripping, intense novel that caught the attention of some important people, first in New York, and then in Nashville.
Through circumstances beyond my control, that novel never got picked up by a publisher. Four books and twenty-some years later, I decided The Tiger’s Cage was too good to stay in a drawer. I pulled it out, and in 2016, my husband and I Indie-published it.
For some readers, it’s their favorite of all my books. It is intense. Violent in some places, edgy in others. It will keep you up at night. But I praise God for that first, middle-of-the-night idea, for my husband’s encouragement, for the help of all those agents, and for the support of my parents and so many others, including Marlene Bagnull of the Greater Philadelphia Christian Writers Workshop.
I guarantee, if you read The Tiger’s Cage, you will not forget the Donovan family.