Unlikely Hero began with an explosion. An image: a nuclear bomb going off near Los Angeles, and the question of what that would do.
So I looked it up. There’s a site called NUKEMAP. It lets you place a bomb of a given yield anywhere on a map, then shows you graphically the casualties, the blast radius, the kinds of injuries at each distance. It’s a sobering thing to use. I placed the bomb all over the Los Angeles area, watching the numbers, until I found a spot up in the mountains where a detonation would do minimal damage to the city itself.
That spot became the one fixed point the entire novel had to serve. The bomb has to end up there. Everything else in the book is the machine that delivers it to that canyon.
How do you build a thriller backwards from a blast?
You follow a chain of necessity. The bomb has to reach a specific canyon in the mountains, so someone has to drive it there and die doing it. That someone became Trevor, the obvious antihero, the only kind of man who could and would make that drive. Then I needed the bomb itself, so the terrorists came next, a cell planning to dwarf Oklahoma City and Beirut. And last came the cop, because a story like this needs an obviously good man in it.
Without one, there’s no one to measure Trevor against, and the book means nothing.
That’s a different way of building than I usually work.
Some of my books grow outward from scattered ideas that spread until they touch. This one ran backwards along a line of what has to be true for this to work. The bomb needs a safe place to go off, so a canyon. The canyon needs a driver, so Trevor. Trevor needs someone to get past, so Martinez. Each piece summoned the next. That backward logic is part of why the book came out so tight and controlled.
The book on this: Unlikely Hero is a lean, character-driven thriller about a career criminal, an honest cop, and a nuclear bomb headed for Los Angeles.
Why open a thriller in a therapy session?
Because the book only works if you believe in Trevor, and you won’t believe in him if the first thing you see him do is kill someone.
So the book opens in a therapist’s office.
Trevor is describing something that happened, a job where a child died, and he can’t get it out of his head. He drives to the family’s house afterward and leaves a bag on their porch. No action, no plot, just a killer failing to explain himself to a therapist. I opened there on purpose. The reader needs to know Trevor has a background, some depth, some regret, before anything else happens.
Without that, he’s a paper character, an evil man who does evil things, and no one has any reason to care what becomes of him. The session is a peek inside him before the story asks you to invest in him.
And then, in almost the next scene, I show him being evil.
That’s deliberate too. Therapy session, then straight into his bad side, back to back, so the reader gets both at once and neither one is a lie. He’s both, established in the first two scenes, and after that the reader never gets to simplify him into a good man with a grim job or a monster with a fake soft moment bolted on for sympathy.
I did the same thing for the cop.
Before the two threads ever touch, I show Martinez working, making an arrest, being an officer, so you know exactly what kind of man he is. You can’t compare two characters at the climax if you haven’t built both of them first. The entire first half of the book is character construction dressed up as setup, and it’s the most important work in the novel.
How do you make a murderer sympathetic without letting him off the hook?
The model I keep in mind is Tony Soprano. He’s one of the worst men ever put on a screen. He kills, he lies, he destroys the people around him. He also has a family and a good side, and across the seasons you have to accept both of those things without ever resolving them into one clean verdict. That refusal to resolve makes him real. I resent villains you can sum up in a single word. They’re props, and readers can smell a prop from the first page.
Trevor works the same way, compressed. The therapy session and the cruelty sit side by side so early that you’re never able to reduce him to one thing. He’s a real murderer. He’s also a man with regret and a rule he can’t explain. Both are true at the same time, all the way through, and I never soften one to make room for the other. The trick is to make the reader unable to dismiss him.
Both are true at the same time, all the way through, and I never soften one to make room for the other.Share on X
Which character carries the moral question in Unlikely Hero?
It asks it through Martinez. If you want a moral question to land, you put it through the most rule-following person you have, because that’s the person it costs the most.
Trevor has to get past two walls to reach the canyon.
I resent villains you can sum up in a single word.
First the terrorists, who catch him and have to be dealt with. Then the cop. Martinez stops the car. And now the honest, by-the-book officer is standing at the trunk of a vehicle with a nuclear device in it, driven by a wanted murderer, and the correct procedure, the thing a good cop is supposed to do, would kill eight million people. Detain the felon. Follow the law. Do everything right, and the city dies.
I don’t know what a real officer would do in that situation. I’m not sure anyone knows. I wrote what felt true, the only thing a novelist can do at a moment like that.
But the question is the point of the book: when the law and the right thing pull against each other, which one are you? And the book refuses to let you answer it from a comfortable distance. It puts you in the patrol car, next to the good cop, at the trunk.
What kind of story is Unlikely Hero, underneath the thriller?
It’s a two-hander. There are plot points, the way every story has them, and there’s a strong arc, but there are only two arcs in the whole book, Trevor’s and Martinez’s. Everyone else is supporting. The terrorists, the people who move through the edges of the story, none of them change. They’re scenery for the two men at the center.
And the shape of those two arcs is the point.
One man against another, and then they have to join forces. Trevor and Martinez begin on opposite sides. The cop is literally the wall between the criminal and the canyon. What drives the book is the moment the good man has to stop opposing the bad man and stand with him instead, because something larger than both of them demands it.
Two enemies bent toward each other until they end up on the same side at the one moment that matters. Strip away the bomb and the terrorists and the chase, and that’s the book: can an honest man and a murderer be forced into the same purpose, and what does it cost each of them to get there.
My take
Strip out the bomb and the chase and you’re left with two men, a murderer and an honest cop forced onto the same side. I’ll take that pairing over any amount of plot. Most thrillers drown in characters who never change. This one has two arcs and everyone else is scenery, and I’d build it the same way again. Read it for the moment at the trunk of the patrol car, and decide what you’d do there.
Why is a murderer the hero?
Because that’s the irony the title is built on, and because I never let Trevor be only a murderer in the first place.
He’s a murderer, and he doesn’t pretend otherwise. But in his own mind, every killing he ever did was justified in some way. They were criminals, or they got in the way. There was always a reason, and he has an excuse for every one of them. His entire moral world is held together by that one habit of mind, and what frightens me is how ordinary that habit is.
Children are the one thing that doesn’t fit it. Trevor doesn’t see a child as a threat, and he likes them. A child can’t be a fellow criminal, can’t have gotten in the way, can’t have earned it. So there’s a floor beneath even a man like him: he believes that anyone who murders a child is worse than he is. That’s the one line he draws, the one place his excuses run out, and it’s the most human thing about him.
He’s a killer who still needs someone to be worse than, and for Trevor that’s a person who hurts a child.
That’s why the ending works, and why I didn’t make it comfortable.
Trevor is a bad man who runs out of excuses, and what he does in the final stretch of the book is the hardest, most honest writing in it. I refused to give the reader the easy version, the murderer revealed as secretly good all along. That twist is a cheat, and I’ve lost patience with books that use it to let everybody off the hook.
The book doesn’t believe that, and neither do I. What Trevor faces in his last hours is the question of whether one right act at the end of a life like his can mean anything at all, and the book has the nerve to sit in that question instead of answering it the way a reader might want.
The ending leaves you with a question it refuses to close, the kind that follows you out of the book and won’t let go. I won’t say what it is here.
But that question is the reason the book stays with people, and it’s the reason I count it among my favorites. The plot is simple, the two men at its center are anything but, and the ending asks more of the reader than the setup ever hints at.
