I am certainly not a computer or internet geek. In about 1986, my dad’s law firm in which I was a junior associate, put word processors on each attorney’s desk. The old guys were lost and afraid. I was not. Soon, we received quite basic computers. Fortunately, my good friend who lived next door to my house was a retired computer programmer. He taught me everything. I remember that he liked to read computer magazines and one day while sitting outside with him and looking at a colorful magazine cover about Windows, I said what is Windows? He responded that it was a bunch of nonsense. It wasn’t real computing. And it would never go anywhere.

Later, came to be and over the years they became more and more. I recall the first time I personally received a letter in the mail (that is snail mail) from Nigeria. It was a ridiculous story about a widow who’d inherited millions and she wanted to share it with me or at least let me share in it by charging fees.  I received a few like that.

But then, I had a husband and wife come to see me one day. I’d prepared the estate plan leaving their modest estate to their family. But they’d been duped, also by paper mail and phone calls, to send money to a foreign country in order to receive a huge amount.  They kept being told they needed to send more, so they did, and when they ran out of money in their savings account, they took out a line of credit on their home. And when they came to see me they were broke and couldn’t pay the mortgage payment.

Then a widower came in. His bank had called his kids to warn that he was sending his money away. He promised me that he would not send any more, but he did.  And then he did because of the executor of a family member’s estate. I was afraid to let him serve as the executor, but under the law, I couldn’t report his past stupidity to the court or the beneficiaries. Again, he promised that he would not send estate money to the court.  So I managed to hold the money in the law firm trust account.  But he did receive distribution of a bank account directly to him and before I knew it, he’d sent it away.

Then in the last six years, our law firm was involved in a large real estate transaction. We represented the seller only. Another law firm was the escrow holder.  Somehow, a scammer got into the e-mail string. This was after title companies were already insisting that no agent could order a wire transfer via email. It had to be in paper form sent via overnight mail.  But the hacker that got into the email string and e-mailed the other law firm, telling them where to send the money, and ignoring what we had sent to the other law firm by paper. So, the large amount of money that was to go to the seller went to a U.S. person who was being paid to run money through her account and soon the money was in the far-east. Our federal government did find the money and got back a good part of it, but not all.

In the 90s, I started giving talks that I called Shams, Flams and Flim-Flams and people were still not so concerned about such things.

In the early months of the COVID-19 Pandemic, I, like many, were watching our state and federal government, business, hospitals and the common people at odds with everybody about what to do. I was traveling internationally and became ill with COVID twice. At the same time, probably only by coincidence, I was seeing many news stories about all kinds of internet crime. I started thinking that there was an interesting comparison in the way people fought over the human virus and computer and internet viruses.  So I started playing with the idea. I read many non-fiction cybercrime books as well as many fiction cybercrime books.

And then I decided that I loved the characters from my prior books and even though the main characters were much older now, their kids, who were young in those books would be about my kids’ ages, nearing 40. So I gathered together those now-adult offspring into this new story. And, I also determined that I wanted a female to be the principal character.

I had no real plan for what was going to happen. I usually do not outline a whole book when I start. I just used some facts that I had developed in the older books, added Cuba to the mix, because it could be interesting to do so, and built it little by little.

I also ran tech things by my brother, who is much younger than I and was a fledgling computer genius as a teenager. He helped a lot. And later I also added a good friend who has a cyber protection company to help me with vocabulary, etc.I also like the water and boats, so of course I used that idea as well. And of course, I needed a little bi-racial romance, something a little funny, and a May-December romance that would annoy the family of the male.

I’ve received pretty good reviews, including from the well-known company, Kirkus.