Today is the publication date of Illegal, my eight novel. Illegal is the sequel to Disappeared and it follows the story of Sara and Emiliano as they seek to escape the evil that threatened their lives in Mexico by crossing into the United States. I did not plan on writing a sequel, but a few months after I finished Disappeared, Sara and Emiliano were still with me asking me to write about their continued journey.
Disappeared and Illegal are my attempts to write thriller-type stories that take place in the midst of current, social/political events: the disappearance of women in Juárez in the case of Disappeared, and the immigration polices and practices of the United States in the case of Illegal. The primary aim of the books is still literary (to keep the readers imaginatively and emotionally engaged with the characters and the moral choices they make), but I also hope that the books serve as a kind of witness to the sufferings of many.
Writing books that are heavy on suspense has been both difficult and fun. Suspense requires careful thinking and planning (difficult for me), a meticulous knitting of conflict and resolution, of hints and discovery. The fun part came from the “seeing” that these type of action stories require. Show don’t tell is never more true than in a thriller. I am grateful for having had the opportunity to grow as a writer through this kind of thinking and seeing. And I am grateful to Sara and Emiliano. They taught me some wonderful lessons about heroism, about goodness and also about how to respond to evil. These books represent my own creative effort to transform anger and powerlessness at the inhumanity of individuals and governments into something that I hope is as useful, as illuminating and as creatively transformative to others as it was to me.
