1--What is the title of your latest release?
THE LOCK BOX
2--What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
Monna Locke, L.A.’s finest safecracker, is kidnapped and forced to participate in the heist of the century.
3--How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
It needed to be a tropical location, but L.A.-based Monna needed to feel lost and out-of-place, so Miami became the obvious setting and I think it worked out pretty well. That said, I really wanted to get a trip to Miami out of it, but COVID kept that from happening!
4--Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
I would, but Monna’s not really the “hang out” type. Some of the people who need safes opened discretely—Monna’s speciality—aren’t very nice, so she’s plenty busy and when she’s not, she’s learned to keep to herself to try and avoid any trouble. Although, as The Lock Box shows, trouble tends to find her anyway.
5--What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Strong, mechanically inclined, and loyal.
6--What’s something you learned while writing this book?
Every one of my books teaches me something about technology, so in this one I learned all kinds of things about how locks work, how safes are designed, and how locksmiths and safecrackers try to beat those designs.
7--Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
Both. Even when I’m working on a first draft, I tend to start my writing day by going over what I wrote the day before and tweaking it. So before I ever get to the first “revision stage” I’ve edited every page of the draft at least once.
The other thing I do editing-wise on the first draft that’s a bit unique is that I tend to keep notes as I go about details and issues that need to be fixed. When I get about halfway through the draft, I stop and go back to the start and do an editing pass, fixing those things—and any other problems I find—before pushing through to the end.
8--What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
Anything with mozzarella cheese.
9--Describe your writing space/office!
I write lots of different places—at the local library, on airplanes, in airports and hotels when I’m traveling. But if I’m home, most days I go to my law office early in the morning and write there from about 4am to 7am. I write on an iPad, so I bring that with me and just sit at my desk.
10--Who is an author you admire?
At this point, there are so many! Everyone in the writing community is so talented, and so nice, it’s really hard to single out people. I’ll give you three.
First, Don Bentley. I met him at Thrillerfest when my first book was getting published and his first hadn’t come out yet. We and some other writers sat around a table and just talked writing for a couple of hours. Even though he was about to be published, you could tell he was still so hungry to get better the craft of writing—it was really inspirational. I didn’t know anything about his personal story at that point, but then when you learn about the things he did in the military…just, wow. And then he goes on to become this superstar bestseller, but he remains so down-to-earth, so approachable. It’s really just such a testament to his character and who he is as a person.
Second, Meg Gardiner. Again, she’s so fantastically talented as an author. I did an event with her for my second book and we both read passages, and when she was done, every mouth in the room was hanging open. And she’s absolutely brilliant—she’s a Jeopardy champion, so you sit down to talk with her and you always learn something you didn’t know, she has fascinating insights on things. But even more than all that, she’s been so giving and generous with her time. She’s obviously incredibly busy but she makes so much time to support other authors like me, I just can’t thank her enough and she’s such an example to everyone in our profession of how to give back.
Third, Danielle Girard. We’ve been friends for a number of years now, so I’ve gotten to see up close how talented a writer she is and how warm and engaging she is as a person. But if you follow her on social media, she’s also just so incredibly open and honest. She talks about the challenges of writing. The doubts. The frustrations. And she’s also open about the things she’s overcome in her personal life. Again, I think it’s so inspiring and so helpful to other people that she really deserves an immense amount of credit.
11--Is there a book that changed your life?
Again, too many to list, but an important one in my journey as a writer was John Sandford’s Rules of Prey. I was just a reader at that point, and a mentor recommended it to me as something to take with me and read on vacation. I was so blown away by the concept and some of the turns of the plot that it really threw down the gauntlet for me and made me wonder, “Could I ever write like this?” Now, years later, I still go back to that book every now and then when I need a jolt or a reminder about how I’m trying to get the reader to feel when they’re looking at my pages.
12--Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
Gosh, it’s such a blur. My agent, Cynthia Manson, had the book (TAKEOFF) out on submission with a few different publishers, so we had several calls in the lead up to plan out the strategy for which editors to give it to, etc. And then she was great about keeping me posted as each one came back with comments, and so forth. So, when she finally called and said that Thomas & Mercer wanted it, that call was the next step of the process she’d put into motion. It was joyful—absolutely—but it was something we’d talked about and planned for, so the moment was less spontaneous than you might think.
In terms of a crazy, joyful, jump-around-the-room moment, I’d say Cynthia’s call that she was going to take me on as a client was more like that. I’d passed her the manuscript for TAKEOFF through my freelance editor but I didn’t know how she’d react to it. She called and said she’d enjoyed it and saw a lot of promise in the character of air marshal Seth Walker. At that point, I’d been writing for so long and trying to navigate the slush pile that hearing an agent saw something in me…I mean, I tried to sound calm and composed and business-like on the phone, but my heat just about jumped out of my chest. I was fist-pumping and dancing around. I knew we still had a long way to go at that point, but honestly that was really the telephone call that convinced me I’d “made it.”
13--What’s your favorite genre to read?
That’s easy—my genre, crime fiction. I was a devoted reader long before I was a writer.
14--What’s your favorite movie?
Heist movies are some of my absolute favorites, which is one of the reasons I wrote The Lock Box. Ocean’s 11 and Inception are two of the best heist movies ever, so they have to be on this list. But I’ll throw one out that isn’t book-related: Jaws. I was a shark scientist before I was a lawyer or a writer, and I’ve seen the original Jaws well over 100 times.
15--What is your favorite season?
This is probably cheating, but one of the reasons I live in San Diego is to avoid big changes in season. We definitely have a summer and a winter, but they’re really mild and if you didn’t live here, you might not really notice. Given all that, I guess I’d say spring?
16--How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
I try to do a couple of things that I love. I’ll usually start the day writing. I’ll usually try to see a movie. And then I’ll also try to do something with each of my two daughters.
17--What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
I just got done reading Eric Beetner’s new thriller Last Few Miles of Road, and it’s fantastic. His lead character, Carter McCoy, is just about the least likely hero you could image, but Eric infuses him with such life and the plot just goes. It’s great.
18--What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Italian. My mother’s family is Italian and that’s the food I grew up eating.
19--What do you do when you have free time?
Between my writing career and my day job as a lawyer, there isn’t that much free time left. But what little I have, I try to devote to my kids. One daughter is off at Oberlin College, but she plays volleyball there, so I watch every match I can. And then my other, younger daughter is a competitive ballerina, so watching her and taking her to/from rehearsal is big time commitment. If there’s any time left in the day/week, I’m still a huge Duke Basketball fan from my time there, so I watch a lot of college basketball.
20--What can readers expect from you next?
The first thing they can expect is a tour. I’m going to be doing events for The Lock Box in a number of cities over the next couple of months—San Diego, Austin, Washington D.C., New York—and then I’ll also be at a series of writing conferences, like Left Coast Crime in Seattle and Bouchercon in Nashville.
In terms of what’s next on the writing front, I’ve submitted two different proposals to Crooked Lane Books for Monna Locke’s next safecracking adventure, and in the meantime, I’m about halfway through writing a completely new book in what I hope will be a completely new espionage thriller.
When an army-vet-turned-safecracker is forcibly recruited to be part of a dangerous heist, she’ll need all her skills to get out alive in this fast-paced thriller perfect for fans of Jeffery Deaver and P. J. Tracy.
Nearly a decade after getting chased out of the Army for fighting back against abuse, Monna Locke’s skill and discretion have made her the go-to safecracker for Los Angeles clients who need vaults opened and no questions asked. When a lawyer hires her to retrieve a box from his client’s mansion, it seems like an easy payday—until she opens the safe and is immediately attacked by heavily-armed men.
Locke barely escapes and returns to her isolated cabin only to find the client waiting in her home, threatening what she holds most dear: her son, Evan. After being knocked unconscious, she wakes up across the country, trapped in her own personal nightmare: she and Evan will be held captive until she helps a seedy crew pull off a seemingly impossible heist.
Forced to practice breaking into the most impenetrable safe ever designed, Locke bides her time and eyes her escape routes. She knows there’s no way to finish the job she’s been forced into, but it’s either crack the lock, or lose everything.
Thriller Crime [Crooked Lane Books, On Sale: March 19, 2024, Hardcover / e-Book, ISBN: 9781639107032 / eISBN: 9781639107049]
Joseph Reid is the author of the Amazon Charts-bestselling Seth Walker series (TAKEOFF, FALSE HORIZON, and DEPARTURE) as well as the forthcoming thriller THE LOCK BOX.
Joseph’s first career was as a research marine biologist, studying all manner of sharks including great whites. After receiving biology degrees from Duke University and the University of California at Davis, Joseph left science for Notre Dame Law School. For nearly twenty-five years, he has worked as a patent litigator, trying million- and billion-dollar cases for litigants ranging from individual inventors to Fortune 50 companies.
While still a practicing lawyer, Joseph turned to writing fiction in his spare time. Joseph’s first novel TAKEOFF, featuring electrical engineer-turned-air marshal Seth Walker, was selected as an Amazon First Reads pick and has garnered over 27,000 reviews and ratings across Amazon and GoodReads. After two more successful installments in the Walker series, Joseph turned to his love of heist stories to create his new novel THE LOCK BOX, which will be released in 2024 under the pen name Parker Adams.
Reid lives in San Diego with his wife and children.
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