Preface. I have long wanted to set a novel in New Orleans. The history, music, architecture,

cuisine, festivals, cemeteries, superstitions, and fusion of French, Spanish, African, and Caribbean

cultures make an appealing backdrop for the action and suspense of a thriller.

I first visited New Orleans while in SEAL qualification training.

I remember doing our last static line jump of the week in Southern California and then zipping to the airport to meet friends for jazz fest in the Big Easy.

I went back with my first SEAL platoon while we were training a few hours away

at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk.

New Orleans is a city that stays with you.

The fourth option is a blend of the crime, political, and military thriller genres

with an underlying foundation that comes

from experiences in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

The idea for this novel has been simmering for years. It was one of the concepts I wanted to

explore when I first spread all my executive summaries out on a table in 2014, studying them to

decide which would become my first novel as I was getting ready to leave the SEAL teams.

I decided on the terminal list, but the fourth option would not leave me.

Then, in the summer of 2021, in our final days of filming the Terminal

List for Prime Video in Los Angeles, I took some time to write out a few ideas for possible

books, television shows, and movies outside the James Reese Terminalist universe. And I revisited

the fourth option, now more thoroughly fleshed out on

the page. That fall, I turned that robust executive summary into a 40-page PowerPoint presentation

with actors attached to characters, location photos, and stills from films and television shows

to capture the mood of the project.

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