Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night

Gregg Hurwitz

As a deputy U.S. marshal tasked with transporting inmates and hunting down fugitives, Gregg Hurwitz's protagonist, Tim Rackley, finds himself in and around prisons on a daily basis. The Kill Clause, Rackley's first thriller, begins with Rackley learning about his seven-year-old daughter's murder. From there, he's drawn into a shadowy commission of men seeking justice outside the law. The Program brought Rack-ley inside a deadly mind control cult, when he was tasked with retrieving the missing daughter of a powerful Hollywood producer. For research, Hurwitz went undercover into mind control cults and submitted himself to cult testing.

Troubleshooter, the next Rackley thriller, opens with the leader of an outlaw biker gang pulling off a daring freeway escape while being driven from sentencing to prison. Clearly, the Rackley series grapples with issues of vigilantism-justice versus the law-each book offering Rackley's ever-evolving perspective. In the course of researching each of the Tim Rackley books, Hurwitz himself spent time behind bars, getting to know the men and women who keep the prisons running.

Dirty Weather was inspired by them.