There are more than 30 Alex Cross novels.
Harry Bosch has walked a beat in L.A. as the lead or co-lead of roughly two dozen Michael Connelly books.
Even my old publishing cousins at Polis Books – Rob Hart and Alex Segura – put their first P.I.s through five stories worth of pain before moving onto bigger and better things in their careers.
So when I sat down and started thinking about the end of Russell Avery’s fictional career while plotting out his third and final novel appearance a few years ago, I naturally had some questions.
Namely – are you serious?
Publishing a novel was my life’s mission. I’ve had a successful journalism career – and don’t get me wrong, putting bad people’s dirt on the front page is a fun way to pay the bills – but it pales in comparison to the fictional side of the fence. I finally broke through with a book deal when the first Russell Avery novel, LINE OF SIGHT, was published by Polis in 2020. The only books I’ve ever sold were told through the lens of my sarcastic, pissy, “seen it all / impressed by none of it” ink-stained wretch. I’ve gotten very comfortable telling stories in Russell’s skin and I had the structure of a good Avery tale down to a science. So why break that? Was I sure my series was over on just the third book?
Ultimately, I decided the answer was yes, for reasons that were both personal and on the page.
On the fictional side – I believed Russell hit his limit. The version of New Jersey’s mouthiest ex-journalist turned ex-P.I. we find at the start of SURVIVING THE LIE has spent two novels getting kicked around and kicked out of his chosen profession. He’s nowhere close to finding work at a daily newspaper again, the professional resurrection he’s been chasing since we first met him. This is a Russell with knife scars and burn patterns on his skin. He’s lost people. Russell isn’t Cross or Bosch or Jack Reacher, he’s not a battle-hardened investigator able to barrel through anything and everything in the pursuit of justice.
My books spend time ruminating on the price of truth and whether it’s a toll worth paying in a world where many people have chosen feelings over facts. Russell grapples with that issue a lot throughout SURVIVING THE LIE, a book where his chief antagonists are conspiracy theorists who are borderline immune to objective reality. Sending Russ into a fight where no amount of proof or reporting is going to aid his cause had to have an effect on him as a character. It had to change something.
From a craft perspective – the level of comfort I’d attained in writing a Russell story seemed like a double-edged sword. Could I write journalism-driven mysteries starring an alternate version of myself for another couple of years and keep selling books? Probably. But I write to explore, to challenge myself and meet a few new people wandering around in my head every now and again. I’ve published a decent amount of short fiction in-between Russell novels, and some of those tales were fronted by female protagonists, told stories from immigrant perspectives, lived in worlds I don’t walk through every day.
That was exciting. It was also a lot harder. And it shook loose some new stories to tell, stories that didn’t fit Russell’s world or with him in a starring role.
So, after 10 years walking down the same path, my fictional newspaper man and I decided to go our separate ways. (Yes, of course he had a say. True to character, Russell doesn’t really ever do what he’s told.) If you want to see how his story ends, SURVIVING THE LIE will be available wherever books are sold on Aug. 11, 2026.
