Deep Strike

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I hope you enjoyed reading Deep Strike!

For those of you who’ve read the first five books in the Trident Deception series, you probably noticed that Deep Strike was a different kind of book. I try hard to ensure each plot is quite different from the others, avoiding the cookie-cutter plot template approach, but the one constant in the first five books has been Christine O’Connor’s involvement. You probably noticed she didn’t have a large role in Deep Strike compared to the previous novels, especially in comparison to the last book, Treason.

As I mentioned in the author’s note in Treason, the plot structure of each book in the Trident Deception series determines which characters play dominant roles, and Christine didn’t have much to do in Deep Strike. Hopefully you enjoyed some of the new characters introduced, including Lonnie Mixell and Khalila Dufour. Unfortunately, thanks to Lonnie, not all of the Trident Deception characters make it to Book 8. (Books 6 to 8, which start with Deep Strike, form a trilogy for the secondary plot theme involving Mixell and his childhood friends, Christine and Harrison, and you’ll note at the end of Deep Strike that there’s a debt to be paid.)

There’s also the Christine — Harrison storyline that’s been running since Book 2 (Empire Rising), with many readers asking: Are Christine and Harrison ever going to get together? Books 7 and 8 will answer that question, secondary, of course, to the main plots in those books. Although in Treason’s author’s note, I said that Deep Strike would make that clear, the necessary chapters ended up on the cutting-room floor; they didn’t fit well with the main plot in Deep Strike, and it ended up being a case of more is less: the extra Christine — Harrison interactions detracted from the overall novel. However, those chapters will be included in the next book, where they fit better.

Finally, the usual disclaimer — some of the tactics described in Deep Strike are generic and not accurate. For example, torpedo employment and evasion tactics are classified and cannot be accurately represented in this novel. The dialogue also isn’t 100 percent accurate. If it were, much of it would be unintelligible to the average reader. To help the story move along without getting bogged down in acronyms, technical details, and other military jargon, I simplified the dialogue and description of operations and weapon systems.

For all of the above, I apologize. I did my best to keep everything as close to real life as possible while developing a suspenseful (and unclassified), page-turning novel. Hopefully it all worked out and you enjoyed reading Deep Strike.