Brian Freeman – The Bourne Shadow

Steve Thomas: Brian, thank you for coming on the podcast.

Brian Freeman: Absolutely. Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Steve Thomas: Before we get into your writing and the Bourne book, what role have libraries played in your life, both personally and then even professionally now as an author?

Brian Freeman: Yeah. Growing up in Chicago and California, I can remember having my very first library card in Chicago and gosh, I left Chicago when I was 10, so I was pretty young at that point, and I still remember we were taking the family vacation. We had a little cottage in Michigan where we’d go for weekends and summer vacations and things. We were going to be there for a long time cause my dad was going to stay and work, and my mom was going to take me and my brother out there. And so gosh, I think I had like a stack of library books this high that I was bringing along on the vacation to keep me busy.

And then as an author I’ve been so pleased to be able to do library events all over the Midwest and all over the country. It’s fun because you have a chance to see both big city urban libraries and libraries in towns that are, you know, 500 people, and there’s always a commonality because the library is always sort of at the center of cultural and public life, whether it’s a small town or whether it’s a big city. I always love doing library events.

Steve Thomas: And we mentioned before we started recording that you’re friends with friend of the show, Rebecca Vnuk of Library Reads.

Brian Freeman: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Rebecca is absolutely delightful. Queen Vnuk!

Steve Thomas: So before you joined the Bourne franchise, were you already a fan of Robert Ludlum’s work and the Bourne books and movies and everything?

Brian Freeman: Yeah. You know, I’d been a Robert Ludlum fan my whole life. I can remember I was in California at that point, so I was probably about 13 years old. I was at a Long’s drugstore, and they had the rack of paperbacks that were freshly out, and I picked up a book called The Chancellor Manuscript, didn’t know anything about the book or the author. I remember buying the book and I walked out of the drugstore and I was already reading it. You know, I was one of those kids that I was walking back reading it. I don’t think I put that book down for the next five hours until I finished it. And I can remember thinking, “Gosh, I mean, that’s what I want to do, is create things like that!” And then in 1980, I would have been 17, I can remember reading Ludlum’s latest book was a thriller called The Bourne Identity, and it became one of my all-time favorite novels.

So when the opportunity arose to be able to take over the Bourne series, that was just such an amazing honor, and I was so pleased to be able to sort of give new life to Robert Ludlum’s legacy. Cause he was such an important part of my reading life growing up.

Steve Thomas: What is it about the stories that you think kept bringing you back to him in particular? Like, what about his work?

Brian Freeman: Yeah, well, there’s a couple of things. I think that Ludlum had a very breathless, propulsive prose style. I mean, it just drove you through the narrative and I think that was something quite different. If you go back to his very first book, which was The Scarlatti Inheritance in the early to mid 70s, looking at the reviews of The Scarlatti Inheritance, you could tell that Ludlum was doing something very different from the thrillers that had come before. This was a whole new approach to how to tell a thriller story. And I think that has kind of rippled through the next generations of thriller writers. That sense of storytelling and that sense of pure drama and suspense, he did that so well, and I love that as a reader.

Steve Thomas: How do you approach taking it on? You’re looking at it, like, “What am I gonna do with Jason Bourne?”

Brian Freeman: Sure. Sure. I mean, my first reaction when I heard the news that I was gonna be taking it over was like, “Oh my god!!” And my next reaction was kind of like, “Oh my god.” Because, I mean, there’s no way around it, it’s Intimidating to think about stepping into the shoes of a giant of the genre like Ludlum and particularly to take over such an enduring iconic character like Jason Bourne.

So I talked to Tom Colgan at Putnam, the editor of the series and so many of the legacy books that are out there now, and he asked, “What do you want to do with Bourne?” And I said, “Well, there are so many iterations of Jason Bourne in the public consciousness right now.” You had three Ludlum novels in the 1980s. You had all of the extraordinarily popular Matt Damon movies. You had Eric Van Lustbader taking over and doing, I think, 10 or 11 of the Bourne books after Ludlum passed away. And I remember this, but not a lot of people do that long before Matt Damon was Jason Bourne, Richard Chamberlain was actually Jason Bourne in an NBC miniseries with Jacqueline Smith of Charlie’s Angels fame as Marie St. Jacques.

So there are so many different visions of who Bourne is, and they’re all very different. I mean, the Bourne of the Matt Damon movies is very, very different from what you find in the Ludlum books. And I said to Tom, I said, “I just don’t think that it works to try to build on what has come before. I think what you need to do now is completely reboot the series. What I want to do is take the character from The Bourne Identity and recreate that character in a very true authentic fashion, but drop him down into all new modern settings with all new story arcs around him and new supporting characters around him.

So I want Ludlum readers to feel like they recognize this character. This is the Bourne that they remember. But at the same time, I want to be able to invite new readers to the party, folks that may not know Jason Bourne and are looking for modern stories. So that’s what I did with The Bourne Evolution, and that’s what I’ve tried to do with all of the books since then.

Steve Thomas: And how do you think about… I mean, it helps I think that this is a character that one of the defining features is sort of he has no memory…

Brian Freeman: It does leave a nice tabula rasa for building plots, yes!

Steve Thomas: But how do you think in your head because obviously there is a past there, and you sort of imply that most of the Ludlum stories kind of happened in some way, like there’s mentions of Marie, and there’s mentions of Carlos, and so like something happened, not like that, like there’s very much ties to Vietnam in the originals, and that’s obviously not part of it anymore, although I did see that you got one little sneak in there when he’s investigating people named Jason Bourne, that there was someone in Vietnam who did this and was like…

Brian Freeman: Indeed, yeah!

Steve Thomas: I saw what you did there.

Brian Freeman: Well, I’m always pleased when people catch those little echoes.

Steve Thomas: But how do you see that timeline in your head? Because obviously you want some of it to have happened, but not all of it.

Brian Freeman: Yeah, that’s kind of the delicate balancing act when you’re talking about a series that’s literally more than four decades old. I had one reader that, he loves the books, but he always sort of complains a little bit on Instagram about Bourne’s age. Cause it’s like, “Well, shouldn’t he be a lot older?” I was like, “Well, you know, if he was in his thirties and forties in the 1980s, he’d be pushing 80 right now!” I don’t know how many people are really looking for an action hero in his eighties. I don’t know, maybe Liam Neeson can take over the Bourne series in the movies.

Steve Thomas: I mean, we’re complaining about that age people running for president, much less being an action hero!

Brian Freeman: There we go! Exactly! So I try to kind of, I try to finesse it. I mean, obviously, I have occasional echoes of Bourne’s past. I reference the incident in which he lost his memory. I’m obviously, you know, deliberately vague about the timeline of when that actually happened, and at the same time I’m trying to drop in and layer what his new backstory would be. There’s references to 9/11 and that he lost his parents during 9/11. So things like that, that sort of start building a new and more relevant modern timeline for Bourne while at the same time trying to have a nod to the original story that created Bourne.

Steve Thomas: I think one of the hooks of the character is the memory loss, and emotions trigger it and bring things back to his present, but how do you balance revealing things about his past while keeping that mystique up?

Brian Freeman: Yeah, the memory loss obviously is such a fundamental part of who he is as a character. I think it’s one of the reasons why he’s proven to be such an enduring hero, because I think it gives him a psychological complexity that readers relate to. This is not simply an action hero drop down, and he’s the same in every book and the plots simply keep changing around him. Bourne needs to evolve and grow and change based on the things that are happening to him because of the complexity that he’s dealing with in his memory loss. So for me, I really enjoy that in terms of building out the psychology of the character.

Although interestingly, when I was working on the second Bourne book, Bourne Treachery, I noticed that for me, it was going a little bit more slowly. It seemed like I was struggling to pull things together, and I realized that I kind of needed to give myself permission to take ownership of the character, that I was still…. In The Bourne Evolution, it was sort of a tribute to Ludlum and The Bourne Identity. It very much echoed things that were going on in The Bourne Identity very deliberately, but now in The Bourne Treachery, I had to sort of share that character with Ludlum. It was not just a Robert Ludlum character now; it was also a Brian Freeman character. So I needed to allow that character to begin to grow based on my stories and once I accepted that, then everything started to flow together.

But in terms of the memory loss it gives sort of a fertile ground for, not only potential danger that awaits that he doesn’t perceive but also, he’s relying on what other people have told him about his past and inherently that means he can’t necessarily trust what people are saying. That’s really the heart of The Bourne Shadow. As I was thinking about where to go in in book five because I always like to kind of go to ground in a long series every few books and really introduce all new threads and build a new cast of characters around them, again, so that new readers can join the party. And so I realized that we’ve done a lot with Jason Bourne’s past in the books, both my books and in Ludlum’s books, but never really dealt with David Webb’s past and how did David Webb initially ever become part of Treadstone. It’s something of course that Bourne doesn’t remember. That’s all part of the mist. And yet again, it gave me a wonderful opportunity to sort of look back at a key part of his forgotten past and then have the lies and betrayals and violence of that past come roaring back to life in the present.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and I think the memory loss probably helps you as a writer because you can have him still be really good at what he does, but it gives him blind spots because it’s like, he should recognize, like in Treachery and then a couple other books, there’s someone from his past that has come back as a villain. He doesn’t know who this person is. He could be staring right at them. So stuff like that, you can sort of create drama where there wouldn’t be normally. For somebody like him who walks in a room and then immediately identifies every danger, but he doesn’t know where they are.

Brian Freeman: Yeah, from a writer’s standpoint, memory loss is sort of the gift that keeps on giving!

Steve Thomas: Do you try to keep track of, like, the Brian Freeman Jason Bourne timeline?

Brian Freeman: Yeah, you know, I get that question with my own series too, with the Jonathan Stride series and the Frost Easton series, do I kind of have these maps of what has happened to the characters? And my answer always is, well, I probably should because inevitably I’m going to make mistakes, and I’ll let slip some huge error or logic mistake. But I deliberately don’t do it because I don’t want the characters to feel like they’re simply a compendium of facts. I don’t I think that contributes to them being two dimensional, so I prefer to reread about the character and rely on my memory of the character and let the character take shape on the page and guide me, which is really how it works for me.

And inevitably, yeah, that means I may get something wrong, and if I do, readers are perfectly happy to point that out to me. But you know, that’s okay. I’d rather have the characters feel fully fleshed out and three dimensional and risk making mistake than sort of reduce them to a biographical sketch on a page. That’s sort of my approach to the character side of things.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and if you mess up, you just say, “Oh no, Bourne remembered that wrong.”

Brian Freeman: Well, and again, when you’re talking about a character with memory loss, yeah, it gives you a pretty good excuse. He’s going to make mistakes.

Steve Thomas: You talked about his past is a big part of the Bourne Shadow, so can you tell listeners what the basic setup of Bourne Shadow is?

Brian Freeman: Yeah. Again, in the Bourne Shadow, we’re really going back to David Webb. How did he get recruited for Treadstone and the very first mission that he did for Treadstone. Bourne has one idea in his head of what that mission was, of what he’s been told by his handler, Nash Rollins, but then he meets a woman who recognizes him as David Webb, and she begins to tell him things about a relationship that David Webb had with her sister in Switzerland, and suddenly Bourne is realizing that things he’s being told about his past don’t align with the stories he’d been told before, and he realizes there was a lot more to his recruitment into that very first mission than he ever knew, and begins to discover that this first mission was a debacle, and that the ripple effects of that failure are now coming right through into the present.

Steve Thomas: Yep, and you hit on, I think that the best books do this, where it resonates with current events. So, not in the U. S. necessarily, but there’s an election going on in another country where there’s lots of rhetoric going around and people fighting back and forth, and there’s an assassination attempt even in there!

Brian Freeman: It’s kind of amazing. I’ve been reading the headlines the last few weeks. I’m thinking, is somebody reading my books out there?

Steve Thomas: Yeah, but you get a good feel for I think just the vibe of the world, I think.

Brian Freeman: Yeah, well, and that’s very deliberate for me in the Bourne books. Ludlum, so many of his books emerged out of the seventies and all the drama involving Watergate and Vietnam and a whole lot of conspiracy theories about the nature of government lies to the public. When I was first taking over the Bourne series, I realized that there were simply a lot of parallels between where we are in society and politics today and where we were back in the 1970s.

So in many ways, this timeline is just sort of made for a revival of Bourne because so much of the Bourne series is focused on that sense of conspiracy, and hidden influences are shaping what we think about so many things. So there’s just a lot of great raw material in terms of things going on that I can use and wrap into the books, and it gives them kind of a “ripped from the headlines” feel.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And there are a couple of other series going on in the, I don’t know if it’s called the Jason Bourne universe, the “Bourneverse”, or whatever, but it’s in the same universe, with agents of Treadstone and Blackbriar and this kind of stuff. Do you all stay informed about that? Because you’ve made vague mentions, like, you mentioned, “Oh, Treadstone’s coming back with director Shaw,” but that’s not who Bourne interacts with. It’s happening over there. I read one of the Treadstone books and they mentioned, ” There’s that agent that lost his memory” and the vague mentions like that.

Brian Freeman: Yeah. I mean Josh and Simon are friends of mine and when I first took over the series, which was the same timeline that they were kicking off the Treadstone series because of the TV series that was coming out on Treadstone. You know, Josh and Tom and I kind of had a conference call to make sure that we weren’t stepping on each other’s toes in terms of plotting. Tom asked me to make a couple tiny little changes in The Bourne Evolution when I got the manuscript done, just to make sure I wasn’t accidentally influencing the shape of things for Treadstone on Josh’s side, but really you know, we’re just going on parallel paths. So it hasn’t really affected either one of us, I think. If we accidentally had something that threw a threw a hand grenade into one of the other manuscripts, you know, they’d step in and say, “Oh, wait, can we change that a little bit?” But so far, at least that has not happened.

Steve Thomas: Your debut novel Immoral was an Edgar finalist for Best First Novel. How do you feel like your writing has evolved since then?

Brian Freeman: I hope that I get better and better with each book. That’s always my goal because you’re building on your craft experience and your life experience. You know, I look back on the early Jonathan Stride novels Immoral, Stripped, Stalked, In the Dark, and I love the books. I still have a tremendous amount of affection for those novels, but at the same time, I like my later stuff better. I think the later books more and more reflect who I really am, and they’re more emotional, they’re more psychological. They’re dealing with tougher issues and themes. And I really work in a lot of difficult themes that the characters have to deal with.

In the Deep, Deep Snow which was also an Edgar finalist, the heroine Shelby Lake is dealing with her father’s dementia and that becomes an important theme throughout the book. I can’t tell you how many emails I received from readers that responded to that theme in the book. So I’m trying to write books that hit very close to the heart. I always call them thrillers with an emotional core, and even in the Bourne books, I think what you see is there’s still a lot of emotion and there’s a lot of personal drama between Bourne and Abby Laurent and Bourne and Johanna in The Bourne Shadow because that’s an important part of who Bourne is, you know, the laconic loner in the Matt Damon Bourne movies, really, that’s not who Bourne was in the Ludlum novels, and I’m trying to capture the essence of that Bourne character in my books, which is really someone who’s not a loner but who struggles with these relationships in his life.

Steve Thomas: Oh yeah, no, in the Ludlum books, the second two books are all about him protecting Marie, protecting his family. That’s the core driving point.

Brian Freeman: Yeah, exactly right.

Steve Thomas: And I know we’re mostly talking about Bourne here, but do you wanna briefly mention Break Every Rule that’s coming out in September as well?

Brian Freeman: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got a new standalone. It’s a busy year! Bourne just came out, and now September 10th, my new standalone, Break Every Rule is coming out. Break Every Rule features a hero named Tommy Miller, and I wanted Tommy Miller and I wanted the book to have the best qualities of both Bourne and my detective hero, Jonathan Stride, so Tommy Miller is sort of a Bourne-esque character in that he’s got a lot of skills from his past, and he’s kind of hiding out from his past in Florida, and when his wife and daughter are kidnapped, he’s got to track them down again, and he assumes, naturally, that his past is sort of coming back to bite him after all these years, but what he discovers is that his wife has been keeping secrets of her own. And so it almost becomes a detective novel for Tommy as he begins to peel back the clues of who his wife really is, and it becomes kind of a redemption story, because he realizes they were both keeping secrets from each other, and that the key to their relationship is to stop doing that and be able to get past those secrets and to be able to actually openly share who they are with each other.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, cool, and I assume there will be another Bourne book?

Brian Freeman: Ah, yes. The Bourne Vendetta is already done, and it’s actually scheduled for release in January. So Bourne fans won’t have to wait too long for more Jason Bourne.

Steve Thomas: Cool. So I’m going to wrap up with a couple of questions that I’ve been asking all of the authors I’ve been talking to this summer. The first one is what was your first favorite book? Like when you were a kid, do you remember what the first book was that really captured you?

Brian Freeman: You know, I can remember, I certainly remember reading a lot of Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators when I was a kid. That was my favorite kid series growing up, but I remember reading, it was kind of a horror novel. I don’t know if a lot of people would remember it, but I don’t even remember the author’s name. It was called When Michael Calls. And I think they actually made it into like a movie of the week on TV, but it was just a scary as heck sort of horror novel, and it was the first really adult novel that I read. It just opened up a whole new world to me. “Oh, this is what adult storytelling is like.” So I had a lot of fun with that.

Steve Thomas: And do you have a favorite Ludlum book?

Brian Freeman: Oh, it’s between The Bourne Identity and The Chancellor Manuscript. It’s tough because I love them both. That was actually one of the things I was really pleased by. I was able to work Peter Chancellor from The Chancellor Manuscript into The Bourne Sacrifice, my third Bourne novel, and I was worried that the estate would be a little nervous about that from a legal and copyright standpoint, but they told me to go for it, and so I think that for Ludlum fans, that’s a real special part of The Bourne Sacrifice.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Cool. And then the last question is we’re putting together a summer reading list. So what, what, what’s a book that you would like to add to our summer reading list?

Brian Freeman: There’s a newly self-published book by a Hollywood screenwriter friend of mine, and I had the chance to read it on vacation a few weeks ago, called Year of the Rabbit. It’s by Tom Donnelley. And just a super, super book, really some great twists and turns along the way. So I would encourage everyone to check out Year of the Rabbit.

Steve Thomas: All right. We will add that to the list. So Brian, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

Brian Freeman: Absolutely. Thank you.

Steve Thomas: Yep. Have a great day.

Brian Freeman: Thanks. You too.

***

Rebecca Vnuk: Welcome to The Circ Desk. I’m Rebecca Vnuk, the Executive Director of Library Reads.

Yaika Sabat: And I’m Yaika Sabat, a librarian working for Novelist.

Rebecca Vnuk: So today we are going to talk about books by Brian Freeman, Steve’s special guest for this episode, and Yaika and I were just chatting. I wanted to be very clear that I actually have a lot of love for Brian Freeman’s books because I know him personally. I got to meet Brian and his wonderful wife, Marcia, about 10 or so years ago at an ALA conference, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since.

One of the things I really like about Brian’s books, I should say first of all, so he has a number of things to choose from for readers, which is what I find great about him as an author. He has two, I think maybe even three, I should go look, different series titles. So he’s got the Jonathan Frost books. They’re “dude books.” Let’s put it that way. He definitely writes books for dudes, although female readers love him as well, but he’s got series books, and then he’s got the Bourne books, which are the ones that he talked about today with Steve. And then he has a number of standalones.

And what I particularly like about that, as a reader’s advisor is that if I can introduce him to someone, you know, someone comes to the desk and they’re looking for things to match, if we’re talking about the Bourne books, for example, right? You kind of match them up with like, “Oh, how about some James Patterson or some Lee Child or some David Baldacci?” Those heavy hitting names in the spy, political, FBI, et cetera, thrillers. But what’s great is they can also springboard off into his other books, so he has standalones, which all got a lot of that thriller element going on, a lot of suspense.

I should say one of his books, is it The Ursulina? I’m actually looking at a list of his book here. He has a book where the main character’s name is Rebecca. I have never asked him. I’m just assuming that it’s after me because I’m so awesome, but you know, I won’t let that color my recommendations.

But it’s great, so he’s got a great number of characters. A lot of them are detectives or they’re former federal agents, and so you get that slice in there as well. So when I’m recommending books a lot of it, Joseph Finder comes to mind as well. People who like his books, I immediately recommend Brian Freeman. I always tell them, he’s got these series that you can start with. He’s got these standalones.

And thinking of this particular series, he was invited by the family of Robert Ludlum to continue on the Jason Bourne series, what a great honor that is. So, as a read alike for that, off of the Library Reads list, I picked All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby, and that appeared on the June 2023 Library Reads list. It was annotated by our Library Reads Ambassador Jill Minor at the Washington County Public Library in Virginia, and her annotation reads, “As a black sheriff in rural Virginia, Titus Crown is caught in political turmoil, while a pedophile mass murderer runs amok. A brilliant perfectionist and former FBI agent, Titus Crown ran for office to change things for the better but can anything honestly change?” And I think that makes a good read alike because right, you have this former FBI agent, so that fits in well with the Bourne series, Jason Bourne. The keywords I’m looking at here are political turmoil, running amok. And then there’s also this kind of shade of he wants the world to be a better place. He’s tired of the bad guys getting the good stuff. And I feel like that is at the core of all of those Jason Bourne novels too, right? Like, isn’t he sort of this rough and ready, but good guy, trying to fix things. He’s a fixer. And so I think people who like that will find a lot of matching appeal factors with S. A. Cosby.

Yaika Sabat: Yeah, and in general, if you like thrillers, check out S. A. Cosby because his writing is fantastic. When I heard that there would be an episode with Brian that would be focused on the Bourne Shadow specifically, thrillers, missing memories, spies, it’s all this stuff, but when I was thinking, I was like, okay, how could I approach this? And I could see one thing that appeals to people about the Bourne books is that there is an adaptation, there’s a page-to-screen adaptation, and thrillers lend themselves so well to on-screen adaptations. There are people who know series from movies before they know that they’re books. They lend themselves to that.

And so I thought about looking for some thrillers that have a similar energy, similar appeals that have been adapted or linked to series that have been adapted. And the first one that came up is the 00 series by Kim Sherwood. The first one is called Double or Nothing. This is a suspenseful, action packed, intricately plotted spy novel. Those are very much the same appeals you get in the Bourne series. But it follows not James Bond himself, but this diverse group of MI6 agents from the 00 program, like, you know, the famous Bond, who have to locate a missing James Bond and so they sort of are putting a fresh spin on the series. They are giving some new life and new characters. There’s more contemporary themes like climate change, but you still get the sophistication, you still get the action, you still get all the things you love about James Bond which, compared to Bourne, Bond is a little bit of a smoother spy depending on the take, but that one I thought would be immediately sort of a fun match.

And then the other one that came to mind is The Gray Man thriller series by Mark Greaney. The first one is just called The Gray Man. This again, it’s suspenseful. It’s action packed. It’s violent. You know, the Bourne books, Jason Bourne’s not afraid of a little violence. It has that, and it focuses on Court Gentry. This the series is also called the Court Gentry thrillers, depending on who’s naming it, who’s The Gray Man. He’s this legend in covert operations. He does the impossible and fades away, and this was adapted into a Netflix film with Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans, which I’m there for that alone.

Rebecca Vnuk: Thank you!

Yaika Sabat: You know, which was very action packed. You get the fight scenes. So I think it is one to check out. It’s going to have, I think, a little bit of a different energy, but it has a lot of those hallmarks you get in Bourne. These assassins, these sort of covert world that we’re being let into as we read the book or watch the film.

And then the last one that I have has not been adapted and it’s not linked to one, but the reason I chose it is, the book is Her Name is Night, which is the first book in the Nena Knight novels by Yasmin Angoe, and I’m sorry if I mispronounced that last name, but this is another series of a trained killer as our advisor described it. I love this description. “Trained killers face down terrifying foes in both of these suspenseful and action packed thriller series. Aninyeh, or Nena Knight, is an assassin protecting the interests of the African Tribal Council, while Jason Bourne must recover his own lost memories.” And so you’ve got the intricate plot. This one’s described as cinematic. So, like, this one hasn’t been adapted yet, but I think it could be.

Rebecca Vnuk: Cinematic is a great reader’s advisory term and that can apply to cross genres, like all over. That is a really great appeal term. I love that.

Yaika Sabat: Yeah, it is, and it’s one of our newer ones. NoveList had some appeal changes that I’m having a lot of fun with, but I do think it’s such an important term. You know it’s cinematic. It grabs you. So yeah, and I liked all three of these because it’s just a little different than the same big names you get over and over again, and I think if you’re looking into thrillers, either as a reader or as an advisor, it is good to make a point to look for new names, look for lesser known titles, look for diversity, if for no other reason than to make sure you’re giving your readers something fresh and helping them discover something they might not have known about.

Rebecca Vnuk: Absolutely. James Patterson doesn’t need our push. He’s doing just fine on his own.

Yaika Sabat: He’s got it.

Rebecca Vnuk: He’s got it. We can use him as a great springboard. “Okay, what do you like about his books? What is it? What do you find entertaining about these? What draws you into that? Let’s match you up with some not-great-big names.” I love that.

Yaika Sabat: Yes, because nothing wrong with a big name.

Rebecca Vnuk: Right? Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yaika Sabat: You know, mix up what you’re offering a little bit.

Rebecca Vnuk: Mix it up, for sure. For sure. And I love being able to recommend series, especially in thrillers like this, because I know everybody has their preferences of, “Do I want to start at the beginning? Is it okay to jump in anywhere?” And with some of these series that we’ve been talking about today, I feel like they’re ones where you don’t have to start at the very beginning. It’s great if you can, but if that book isn’t on the shelf, feel free to hand somebody a middle book or the newest book because many of these authors and I know, for example, I’ve read enough of the Jonathan Stride books from Brian Freeman to know he lets you know what you need to know about this character, and what you need to know about his life and what has happened to him in the past, but you don’t feel lost if you’re coming into it on like book three or four. It’s almost like it makes you want to go back and find out the rest, but the stories are standalone enough on their own that you don’t feel like, “Oh, I have no idea who this character is or what he’s doing, what’s going on.” That to me is the beauty of thrillers like this, the series thrillers, that they are standalones, but they’re also a series. So it’s a great dovetail.

Yaika Sabat: A lot of them are like, yeah, I’ve noticed that in thrillers. Like, it’s great if you can read the whole thing, but the authors do tend to capture enough of the character’s core elements in every book that you’re not, most of the time, you’re not gonna be like, “I don’t understand this character’s motivations.”

Rebecca Vnuk: Right, the best authors like this do a great job with that character. It’s okay that you might not know what happened to them in the last book, you know who they are as a character and that’s what you’re reading for, is to get a sense of who that person is and how they’re interacting in their world, even if you don’t know what they might have done before.

Yaika Sabat: And also don’t be afraid to tell readers that because sometimes readers sort of back away from a series. And if you say, “If you’re not into series, you can actually just read this one. And if you like it, you can keep going, but it’s a great story just in this one novel.” Because some people are just not in it for like a 12-book series or a series at all, but let them know they can still enjoy the experience.

Rebecca Vnuk: Exactly. Well, all right. Those are our words of wisdom today from The Circ Desk. I know Steve’s summer reading series is coming to an end with this episode, so we hope that he brings us back and that you can check us out again on The Circ Desk. Thanks, everyone!