Needing something to read on a flight out of Phoenix, I picked up PRIME WITNESS by Steve Martini in the Sky Harbor News kiosk back in 1993. There I met his protagonist, lawyer Paul Madriani; by the time I landed in San Diego, I was hooked. I trolled the San Diego kiosk before my return flight and was delighted to find his earlier thriller, COMPELLING EVIDENCE, so I buried my nose in the pages for the flight home.

This was back in the day when you could dial “0,” get the phone number of real people --- even budding authors --- and talk to them on that rapidly vanishing device called a telephone. Remember landlines? Remember boarding a plane without removing jackets and shoes, or being frisked and X-rayed?

“He’s in his den, procrastinating. Staring at a blank page,” I was told by his wife. We held a delightful conversation about the trials and tribulations of writing and living with an author, which ended by my saying, “Go tell him a fan called to tell him to get busy because I want to read the next one.”

"The action swiftly moves to Washington, Mexico, France, Switzerland and China as [Paul Madriani and Harry Hinds]  follow the money trail that leads to a powerful Congresswoman who holds an important seat on the Armed Forces Committee."

Twenty-odd years later, in the 13th and latest Paul Madriani thriller, THE ENEMY INSIDE finds him reluctantly taking on a case of a DUI-vehicular homicide arrest against Alex, a friend of his daughter’s. A high-level Washington, DC attorney was killed in the fiery collision between her car and his. All contents of both vehicles were obliterated in a massive explosion, but Alex was pulled to safety by a passerby just before his car was engulfed in flames. He wakes up at the hospital remembering nothing after he left a bar, where he met a girl who gave him a slip of paper with the address to a party at an exclusive estate in the California foothills. The last thing he remembers is plugging the address into his GPS, which is now toast. His blood alcohol barely registers on the mandatory test, affirming his claim that he was legally sober.

Paul and his partner, Harry Hinds, soon find themselves embroiled in a complicated plot. They must hunt down a woman who used a satellite-controlled device to murder the attorney who held dangerous secrets involving players at the highest levels of international politics. This mercenary assassin holds the key to a sophisticated new device that can overtake the controls of any vehicle to send it hurtling at deadly speed into a collision that is guaranteed to kill its occupants and destroy all evidence in a fiery explosion. The device only works on modern, computer-driven vehicles. Paul, who holds his ’89 jeep in high regard, is immune from the high-tech cyber world that has changed virtually every aspect of 21st-century life. For a while, at least, until the bad guys zero in on them with more deadly and conventional means. The action swiftly moves to Washington, Mexico, France, Switzerland and China as they follow the money trail that leads to a powerful Congresswoman who holds an important seat on the Armed Forces Committee.

Martini, like most successful thriller writers, has had to keep up on the latest weapons and communications systems of our cyber world-driven society. It would be fun to sit down with Martini, who now lives, like most authors, at an ambiguous website address in the “Pacific Northwest.” My conversation would lean toward how much research he finds himself doing to keep abreast of current technology, and if he has a cadre of researchers, or if he holes up in his den and searches the fathomless depths of the Internet. How smart is he on his smartphone? Does he text everyone, or does he still relish the idea of the old-fashioned receiver with the human voices of family and friends at the other end? If he still has his beater jeep, I’m betting he still uses a telephone --- or at least misses the one he gave up.