S3 EP 114: A. J. Landau, Author(s) of Leave No Trace

Hello Happy People

Dianne brings you her first ever writing team interview. While she has interviewed authors with a partner, she's never interviewed both authors in the same interview. She had so much fun talking with Jeff Ayers and Jon Land, she may have to reconsider and do more multi-author interviews. 

Both men were both accomplished writing professionals long before they joined forces to create the unique and masterfully crafted thriller, Leave No Trace, the first in a new series under their pseudonym, A. J. Landau. If you are blessed to spend any time at all speaking with this talented duo, it is easy to see how they complement each other in style, knowledge, and mutual admiration. 

Jeff Ayers worked as a reference librarian for nearly 30 years while pursuing his own writing career as a freelance writer and reviewer, for which he earned honors such as Fiction Reviewer of the Year. During his career Jeff had the opportunity to interview such notable authors as Dan Brown and James Patterson, among others. 

Jon Land has been a noted author since the 1980s with more than 60 books to his credit. While best known for his long and respected career as a thriller writer, Jon has produced a variety of work from award-winning nonfiction to a screenwriting credit for the film Dirty Deeds.  

Listening to the men talk about their working relationship, it's easy to understand how this writing team works so well. Both men are quick to compliment the other for what they bring to the partnership. Their thriller, Leave No Trace has received numerous impressive recommendations from a host of bestselling authors. such as Michael Connelly, Brad Meltzer, Lisa Gardner, Karin Slaughter, and more. 

So don't wait, go listen now!

Jeff Ayers on Amazon
Jeff on Facebook
Jon Land on Amazon
Jon on Facebook
Jon's Website
Leave No Trace on Macmillan

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to BookBanter with me, your host, Diane Burkhart. I hope you will join me every Wednesday as we explore all things to do with, well, books. Let's get on with our show today. Hello, my happy people. Today is April 17th, 2024. And where is this month going? Oh my gosh. Whenever I am super busy with lots of interviews, I lose track of days and I look up and suddenly two weeks have gone by and I feel like I've missed most of the days. If you are watching my blogs, you will know that I kind of missed my Manic Monday vlog this week. I did do it on Tuesday. I did catch up, but I completely forgot to do it on Monday. So yeah, it's that kind of a week right now. But the great thing is that's because I have got so many incredible interviews coming up. You just will not believe who's going to be in the lineup pretty soon. So be sure to stick around until the end of today's episode, and I will tell you about some of the great authors that we have coming up. But for now, we need to get on with today's interview because it is absolutely incredible. This is the first time I have ever had a team of authors come on together. I've interviewed author teams before, but it's always been one-on-one. But today I talked to both men behind AJ Landau and the book Leave No Trace. The authors are Jeff Ayers and John Land, and they were so much fun to talk to. So I'm not going to waste any more time. Let's get straight to their interview. Please welcome the writing team behind A.J. Landau, Jeff Ayers and John Land. The way that I usually start out is I have the author introduce themselves and tell the audience who they are and what they do. So why don't we start with Jeff?

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Hi there. So my name is Jeff Ayers, and I am a retired public librarian. My first book was a guide to the Star Trek novels. It was a reference book that looked at all the novels that have been published up to that point. And I read over 550 of them for that project, as well as interviewing over 350 people, including William Shatner, which was fun in itself. And I'm the co-executive director for Thrillerfest, which is uh the International Thriller Writers annual conference that they hold in New York every year. And then also I'm uh half of A.J. Landau with uh John Land.

SPEAKER_02 2:40

And John? Yeah, I've had a little more experience. I've written, I've lost count. I think it's 65 books. It might be 66. Another one coming out in August, followed by another one in January. And then the second in this series will be February. But here's the thing: I could talk about the old series, all the things that I've done, my failures, my successes. But the bottom line is this is a business based on today, not yesterday. And when Jeff approached me about working with him on the National Park series, starting with Leave No Trace, I saw it as I would like to say a second chance, but more like a seventh or eighth, another opportunity to grab the brass ring that had eluded me in the past. And the thing about this business is before you can become successful, before you can remain successful, you have to be relevant. You have to remain relevant. You have to be somebody who's willing to adapt to conditions, someone who's willing to change with the times. And I got very lucky that Jeff came to me about this series at a time when I was searching for a new identity. I didn't know at that point it was literally going to be A.J. Landau, our pseudonym for the two of us in the series. But the opportunity to write something that I felt was fresh and original and mold it from the start without the baggage of my own name, so people would have expectations that might be unrealistic because this was a new start. I'm really grateful to Jeff for the opportunity to do it. And I love how Leave No Trace. I love the final product. I love everything about it. When you start out any book, you have a vision, you have a rough idea of what you want it to look like. It's kind of like building a house without any blueprints, without any plans. You don't know what it is you're building, at least when I write. And Jeff was patient with me with that. So I love the house that we built with Leave No Trace. The structure of it is strong. It checks every box of a thriller fan's dream book, which is what we wanted to do. And I'm having a blast writing the second one.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

You know, and I do have to admit that I agree with you that it does give a thriller reader everything that they want. And I tend to be super critical of these kinds of books because I actually am certified in forensic criminology. And I did extra studies for profiling and sex crimes. So I actually have a background in a lot of investigative practices. And so when I'm reading these kinds of books, I'm always like, you can't do that. That's that's not what they do, you know. And reading this, I did not have those thoughts. I just enjoyed the story and got sucked into it.

SPEAKER_01 5:32

I'm so glad to hear that.

SPEAKER_02 5:34

Yeah, and I think I'll let Jeff touch on how we managed to please even the expert audience because we really were painstaking in it. We were very fortunate to get a whole 14 blurbs, advanced quotes, 10 of them from number one New York Times bestselling authors. Literally 10 from authors who had been number one on the Times list. But the one that meant the most to me, following up on this, was from a professor who actually teaches at Georgetown University. And she teaches national security, she teaches homeland security. Oh, wow. And she gave us a blurb that was so perfect. It meant more to me. The fact that she was saying she might even use our book in her class about domestic terrorism. It was just to me, that was more important, maybe not as relevant to use that word again, maybe not as relevant to a pop culture audience as those number one New York Times bestselling quotes. But that quote meant more to me because it showed that someone who was an expert in the field in real time had vetted our book. But Jeff, that wasn't an accident, was it?

SPEAKER_01 6:49

No, one of the things about the research behind this book was trying to get as much of the details as right as possible. And so that meant me visiting the national parks, talking to the rangers. I actually got to be a park ranger for a day at Mount Rainier. Oh, cool. And there's um, so we'll talk about characters in a minute, I'm sure, but um Michael, who's our main lead, is an ISB agent, which is the investigative services branch of the National Park Service, which is their FBI. And I got to interview one of the directors of that organization as well as Shadow One at a park. Then we also had them vet the book. We also reached out to the National Park Conservation Association, and they looked over the book as well and gave us some feedback. And then we also had a former FBI agent do it as well. And so basically, we had experts in every aspect that we wanted to make sure we got right read it and give us feedback to make sure we weren't goofing up in any way.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

See, and when you read this, that comes through. I mean, the way that it is laid out and the procedures and talking to each other about the hierarchy and all the problems of having to go through all the proper channels when you're investigating something like what occurs in the book. I I love that.

SPEAKER_02 8:10

So glad. And you know, Jeff and I are the perfect team because Jeff grounds me in a measure of reality, which is a big challenge because I tend to make stuff up. I back into situations where I'll write something and then I'll figure out how to make it credible. Uh I live by the great credo spoken by Robert Lewis Stevenson. It doesn't matter to me if you believe what I'm writing is true. All that matters to me is that you do not disbelieve it. And that's where the phrase, the suspension of disbelief, comes from. But in this book, you don't really have to suspend disbelief very long. Because although it gets very high scale, the ultimate stakes are involved. It never deviates into camp, it never deviates into what the James Bond series became for a great number of years in the Roger Moore series. We did have one scene. Now I gotta tell you this story, Diane. Because Jeff had a rule. He had a rule. I was only allowed. I was only allowed to partner with him on one condition. He only had one condition for me. I have a tendency in my books to always use organic animals, giant spiders, killer beetles, you name it, I've used nature in some twisted, thrillerdom way.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:34

So I promised I would have no killer animals. And then I called him one day and said, Jeff, you're gonna hate me. But don't hate me a lot until you read the scene. Because I had gotten to the point, Michael, Michael is a disabled hero. He lost a foot in the same incident on Mount Rainier that killed his wife. That comes back into the book. Thriller fans will know that as an important plot point. But beyond that, his foot was so badly damaged in the shootout, they had to amputate it. So he is, to my knowledge, the only disabled hero in thriller fiction today. So as we're approaching the climax of Leave No Trace, he's up against this giant maniacal killer who's probably claimed about 10 lives, 50 lives, more lives already because he was responsible for the bombing at the Statue of Liberty, which opens the book. There's no way Michael's lost his prosthetic foot. He's using a branch as a crutch. How's he gonna beat this guy? How's he gonna take him on? Well, when I called Jeff, I said, I did some research into Zion, and I found the perfect animal that allows, that allows, I and I don't want to give it away. Jeff H when I give it away, but I'm not gonna give so I won't do that, but I will say it has been called the most creative way of killing someone that some readers who read a lot of these have ever seen. And in fact, right from the beginning, Diane, there was a trend. They did a Goodreads campaign, Minotaur, our publisher. So we were getting dozens and dozens of advanced reviews months before the book came out. And most of them were extremely positive, but all of them said the same thing, even the ones that weren't as positive as we had liked. They loved the scene I just described, much to Jeff's chagrin. And Jeff, why don't you pick up with the other thing that they loved?

SPEAKER_01 11:29

Uh, in addition to that scene, which um, yeah, even uh an editor for a place I review said, Oh my gosh, what are you thinking for that scene? So each chapter of the book opens with a factoid about where the chapter is set. And one of the things I love about really great thrillers is you come away learning something as well. So you've had a great time dealing with the thrills in action, but also, wow, I actually learned something about something. And so one of the things John and I talked about was wanting people to learn about the National Park Service and what they do, because most people don't know that they oversee over 430 locations, including national monuments, like uh the Statue of Liberty or Devil's Tower, for example, uh historical sites. Uh you can learn all about the Revolutionary War in a bunch of places, or Gettysburg is a historical site. And then, of course, the national parks. So each chapter opens with a factoid, and a lot of folks in the reviews have said they really appreciate that aspect of the book.

SPEAKER_00 12:36

I actually had that fact here in my notes that I wanted to talk about that because I thought those little historical notes at the beginning of each chapter was so interesting because it's a great way to add some educational knowledge in with the fiction fun so that it's not like you're being force-fed anything. It's just an interesting little fact every once in a while. And I am horrible about remembering things like this. And I was going into my husband's like, Hey, did you know that this is true about this monument? And he was just looking at me like, where is this coming from? It's like, oh, it's the book that I'm reading right now. He's like, Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

See, but I think that those kinds of things, whenever you can add in educational bits along with the fiction, it just makes it more interesting.

SPEAKER_02 13:30

It also in this book, the thing that really is special though, Diane, is that the kind of things we're doing, it's organic. For instance, the secondary hero, the said this, I shouldn't say secondary, she shares the stage about 50-50 with Michael, is Gina Delgado. Gina is the assistant special agent in charge of the New York Field Office, the biggest office in the country of the FBI. She is the youngest woman and first female Latina who's ever reached that high a level. But a book like this, which is about bombings, which is about attacks on national monuments and memorials like the Gateway Arch, like the opening scene in the Statue of Liberty, which is a story in itself. We should get to that, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the thing that's most important is you need to have someone who knows explosives, because someone has to be the eyes and ears of the reader. Someone has to be the POV for what's going on with all the big booms. Well, normally in a thriller like this, you have a third character who's an explosive expert. We decided to make Gina our explosive expert. And here's where the organic nature of the book comes in. That led us to draw her background in one of the most unique ways I've ever seen a hero introduced, in the sense that her father was an excavation expert. He did demolitions for buildings. So after her mother died and she was raised by a single father, he would take her to job sites and she fell in love with his work. And as a little girl, she was building bombs out of firecrackers in the basement. And there's a great little twist in the book about the first time she actually uses an explosion to hurt people and why she does it. And it really organically creates a character who you not only understand is an expert in her field and why, but you understand who she is as a person, what drives her. She was also the first woman to ever serve with a special forces A team in Iraq, where she really got her biggest experience in explosives as an expert over there during the surge 06, 07, 08. She was over there somewhere in that general range. And then she joined the FBI. So just like Michael's rich background, which ties in directly to the nature of the book, so too does Gina's background tie in organically to the nature of the book.

SPEAKER_00 16:11

You know, one thing that we've been really talking about a lot in season three on this podcast is the importance of inclusivity and representation in fiction. And the fact that your main characters are a man with a prosthetic foot and doing his job without too much complication. And then a young female Latina who's in charge of the FBI unit, this is not the typical things that we are used to seeing in these kinds of books.

SPEAKER_02 16:43

Jeff and I felt that it's not just inclusivity, which is obviously very important. It's not just diversity, it's also the fact that when you create a character, when you create heroes who have been forced to overcome adversity, you already are investing the reader with them from the start. Because the reader is rooting for them because of just the reason, Diane, you articulated that they're different. They don't fit the norm, they're not regular. Michael is an ISB agent, but he had to go through arduous training and he refused to take any breaks or anything. I have to prove to myself, not just to you, that I can handle the rigors of this job. So one of my favorite scenes in the book is when he climbs Angel's Landing and when he gets to Zion. For an able-bodied person to climb Angel's Landing is a big accomplishment. To see uh a person with a prosthetic foot climbing Angel's Landing is even more of an achievement, an accomplishment that makes the reader root for him more, just as they're rooting for Gina, because she has already overcome incredible odds to get to where she is.

SPEAKER_01 18:03

The other reason we had Michael have a prosthetic foot is because of the incident that happened at Rainier where he lost his wife and lost his foot. Here's a man who has to wear his grief every single day.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

Exactly. We know, and I think characters like this, though, are just so representative of the world we actually live in.

SPEAKER_02 18:29

They are. Yeah. And they're also that way emotionally. I mean, Gina's relationship in flashbacks with her father, Michael's relationship with a 15-year-old boy that he meets on the site of the toppled Statue of Liberty in the Rubble, the boy is the only eyewitness. And Michael becomes very protective of him, makes arguably a misjudgment about what happens forward. But the reason he does that is because he sees in that boy who's lost his family, who's lost everything, he sees himself because he had lost his wife. So their relationship, which in a book that takes place over such a short period of time and has such a rapid fire pace, it's very difficult to develop secondary relationships. But not only did we develop that relationship, not only is one of the most harrowing scenes in the book, Michael saving the boy or trying to save the boy, the wit, the only eyewitness, from a contract assassin in the hospital where he's been placed. Not only that, it's this fact that we like what we were doing so much. Jeff had an important note, an important way forward about this relationship, which I thought Jeff was great. Why don't you take it from there? I'm not sure what you're hinting at, John, actually. The idea that we needed closure for Danny for the boy. Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

Oh, of course. Um, yes, because when we finished the original draft, we didn't really have closure for Danny at all. And we went back and looked and said, wait a minute, what happened with Danny? And so I think having the closure at the end, along with the vision that we had from the beginning on how the book was going to end, I think wrapped everything up super nicely. And we have a lot of people asking us if Danny's gonna be coming back, which is neat to see.

SPEAKER_02 20:40

It is, you know, you know you've struck gold when readers are asking for a character to come back who you never intended to even have a major role in the book. Yeah, so we had a lot of fun creating out-of-the-box characters. I might mention too, Diane, there's a secondary hero, a third hero who has a POV, an individual point of view, who's an 18-year-old Native American boy. He's tracking something, he's tracking a shipment of one of the key pot points in the book. He's tracking a shipment because he thinks it's about the environment and he's part of a group that's protecting the environment. It turns out to be something much different. So he becomes the ultimate reluctant hero. And he was so much fun to write for that reason. Because also, you know, he's a kid who doesn't have a lot of respect from his Native American tribe. He's trying to prove himself. This becomes his rite of passage at 18. If he succeeds, if he survives, he's going to become a man in Native American culture. So the challenge of doing a series and doing a book like this is it's a thriller. It's supposed to be something you can't stop reading. But the reason you can't stop reading it, and here's the challenge, is to create characters that the reader makes an instant emotional investment in. I think part of the great thing of being inclusionary in this book is having characters who have so much that defines them as heroes in ways that are not traditional to the thriller.

SPEAKER_00 22:27

I think you definitely have captured that interest and empathy in the reader, the way that you wrote the story. The characters do really start to make you care about them. You care what happens to Danny. Whenever he's gone, you're like, okay, wait a minute, who's watching him? Is he okay? So now is this going to be a series?

SPEAKER_01 22:49

Yes. And in fact, uh, from the topic we were discussing earlier, just so we can see what we've got next.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

See, and unfortunately, since we don't have video, you didn't see my little yay move when you said that.

SPEAKER_02 23:04

And the great thing about the second book, which is called Cold Burn, you know, it's into the home stretch now, but just about three-quarters of the way done in the first draft, which is the most important stage. And it does all the things that people loved about Leave No Trace, but it does them in a different way. It has an entirely different setting. We're up in Alaska for most of the book. We're also in the Everglades, and we're in sort of in Glacier Bay National Park, but we're also in the Everglades in Florida. Nice contrast there. So it's a lot of fun because it doesn't feel redundant, does it, Jeff? It doesn't feel like we're doing the same thing, only different. Yeah. It feels fresh, it feels original, it feels like something we haven't seen before for the second time, instead of just rewriting the same book again. So a lot of fun because the great thing here here's the definition of a great series, Diane. You can start the series in any book, in any order, and not realize that you missed anything. But it makes you want to go back and read all the books you didn't catch and also go forward and pick up where you left off. If you can do that in a series, so every book reads like a standalone, but it's actually a continuation, you have struck a very high bar.

SPEAKER_00 24:30

That would be a very tough thing to accomplish. That that does take a really special talented author to be able to do that kind of thing. You see so many anymore that each book in the series seems to be the same characters. They just have the same plot line. It's just the person who's killed is different, the person who discovers the body is different. But a lot of them feel like the same story over and over.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

One of the beautiful things about the parks is each one is so vastly different from the other. That gives John and I an opportunity to just totally have fun and explore all these different avenues and stories.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

One thing that I definitely want to ask about this, because I cannot imagine writing with a partner. I am such a control freak. And whenever I was going through college, the thing that I feared the most was a group project. How do you make this work? How do you come together to do one story?

SPEAKER_01 25:36

I think the most John is amazing.

SPEAKER_02 25:40

No, I think the most important thing, Diane, is as writers, as a writer or as singular or plural, in this case plural, you have to know what your strengths are. And you also have to acknowledge what your weaknesses are, what your limitations are. We complement each other perfectly because everything I need more help with, Jeff is brilliant at. First of all, he and I have worked on books before because he basically gave me the endings to two or three books in my Caitlin Strong series that were languishing because I didn't know how to end them. I had boxed myself into a corner. So I knew Jeff was brilliant at structure. And I'll and I'll say this writing a book, if you have a great story to tell, is easy. Coming up with the great story to tell, that's the biggest challenge. So having someone like Jeff that I can call on the West, he's on the West Coast, I'm on the East Coast. So obviously I can call him at 11 o'clock at night my time. It's only eight over there. And I can say, Jeff, I just had a thought. And we'll knock things around. So although I do the bulk of the writing on the early draft, and then he edits and adds his two cents, even though the bulk of the words may be coming out of my computer, everything that's coming out is something we've discussed, something we've hashed over, something I'll go, oh my God, I just realized something. Because I used the term organic earlier, Diane. Nothing is more important in a book than having it be organic in the sense that it doesn't feel overly structured. It feels like life. It feels like it's unfolding and you're surprising yourself. And as a writer, you have to have the awareness, the sensitivity, and the ability to realize what you're doing is taking you in it in the direction you should not be going. There are so many examples of this from both books that something just didn't feel right at the time. I'll give you one example, then turn it over to Jeff. We thought we were done with Leave No Trace, pretty much. Just finish work on it. Kind of like painting the inside of the house after everything else is done. I called him up one day and I said, Jeff, who's the villain in this book? And what makes them the villain? And what I had realized, there are two villains in this book. One is a fanatical ex-general who's an ultra-right wing nationalist, and the other is a man who hates the country, hates the national parks, hates everything for entirely different reasons. And it felt like neither one of them was cast properly. So we went back in at the 11th hour together. We thought it out, we hashed it out, and then we created an entirely new background for both these guys. We created the moment where they came together, we created their motivation, how much they knew, what they didn't know, how they enlisted the help of others. You have to be, and this is the point I'm getting at. You must learn to be objective about your own work. You've got to be able to evaluate your work as the first person to read it, not just as the person who wrote it. I think that's important.

SPEAKER_01 29:19

One of the things that uh John forgot to mention in that particular scene he's talking about and background is that um we were actually able to find a historical thing that actually happened that we were able to put into his backstory again, um, trying to make it as accurate as possible. And that's the detective.

SPEAKER_02 29:42

Yes. And the fact is, Jeff's not giving himself enough credit because this was all him. And it was basically the fact that part of Mount Rainier was when Rainier was expanded, they used eminent domain, the Park Service, to take over land in Washington State. And they took this man, this villain's land away. And it created a Ruby Ridge-like situation where he refused to leave, and federal marshals and the FBI and you know, Steve McQueen and the Texas Rangers showed up, you know, um, because what he was doing was wrong. He was squatting on land that was now the government's. But what happens as a result of that is the motivation for what he's doing now. And that's key. So what Jeff is saying, and not giving himself enough credit for, is we were able to take the actual history of the national parks and make it work for us in the creation of the villain's motivation for wanting to overthrow the U.S. government and kill 10 million Americans in the process. And he's not a cartoon, he's not a caricature. He's just a guy who's got power and has some skills and access that allows him, that enables him to do the things he wants to do in this book.

SPEAKER_00 31:02

You know, listening to the way that you two go back and forth, I'm really curious. I mean, because you sound like you have to be good friends in real life. How long have you known each other?

SPEAKER_01 31:13

Close to 20 years.

SPEAKER_00 31:14

Oh, wow. How did you meet?

SPEAKER_01 31:17

I mentioned in my uh initial bio that I'm the coexecutive director for Thrillerfest. Thrillerfest is where I met John. I had been reading John's books since the late 80s. I'd see them in the Waldman's books on display, and like, oh, I'd just buy it without even reading what the book was about because I was such a huge fan. And then the very first Thriller Fest in New York, I went, and he was the one author I wanted to meet because I was such a huge fan, and I, you know, brought my books and everything. And uh we hit it off and became great friends. And if you told me in the late 80s that someday I'd be writing a book with him and be friends with him, I would have thought you were nuts.

SPEAKER_02 31:57

And of course, I am nuts. So that means so much to me. And Jeff is a master of the craft in that he reads every thriller, it seems like, that's ever published. You know, he knows, like me, he understands the tradition and the legacy of the genre. You know, I remember what it was like as a little boy reading Doc Savage and the Executioner series. That's kind of where I started after I went from James Bond, the Ian Fleming series, into those books. And I remember what it felt like just to read a book from cover to cover in a single day without moving. And what I've tried to do with every one of my books over the course of 40 years, and what I think is most emblematic of Leave No Trace is we want it, because both of us are the same in our taste of books. We want it to give our readers the same experience reading Leave No Trace that I got from the Matterezi Circle, that I got from the Holcroft Covenant, Robert Ludlum, that I got from Firestarter. Why am I mentioning these books? Because good writers borrow, wrote Victor Hugo. Great writers steal. And I started my career stealing from the books and the stories and the authors that I like the most. So this book that's the effect we want it to have on people who read it. We want them to have the same feelings that we had from the time I think both of us, Jeff, were boys reading until now. You know, you want to sweep them away and take them into a different place. So they're no longer in their world. They've been transported to our world, the world of Leave No Trace, the world of Michael Walker and Gina Delgado. And the bottom line, I cannot stress this enough, Diane, when I talk to writers and they say, What's the most important thing? What's the most important thing? And I've answered that question a hundred different ways. Now I answer it only one way. Not just tell a great story. That's what I used to say. Now I say, have fun telling a great story. Because if the writer is not having fun writing it, how can we expect the reader to have fun reading it?

SPEAKER_00 34:24

That's a great point.

SPEAKER_01 34:26

One of the other things uh I want your listeners to understand is, you know, we're talking about all this action, we're talking about these characters, but the book is also a love letter to the folks who work for the Park Service. Because we didn't want to have all this stuff happen and then have someone who actually works for the Park Service read it and go, oh, they got the details right, but we come across pretty badly. So the book is actually dedicated to them because they do such an amazing job keeping the legacy alive for future generations. And that was one of the other reasons we went to the National Park Conservation Association was to make sure we were not going to offend them in any way.

SPEAKER_02 35:05

Diane, spoiler alert. Um when Jeff first called me about this, when we're talking about the national parks, and the first thing I said was, Well, we got to blow up the Statue of Liberty on page one. Now, we tell that Jeff tells that story a lot. But what we don't tell enough, and again, here's the spoiler alert, is he had a condition. There was a caveat. I I had so many conditions. You had a lot of conditions, Jeff, and I broke every one I did. Jeff's condition was if we're gonna blow it up, if we're gonna topple it, because it's made of copper, so you can't blow it up. You can it'll get bent, it'll get you know damaged when it topples, but it's not like concrete, it's not going to just turn to rubble. He said, if we're going to topple it, the last scene of the book, we have to raise it again. We have to show that it's bad, that America has won, that the bad guys hurt us, but they didn't destroy us. We won in the end. It was always going to be thrillers. Look, it's a series, so you know they the heroes survive. That's not a mystery. But the notion is I believe in happy endings. I believe you read books as a catharsis that don't unfold necessarily like real life. In real life, the good guys don't always win, the bad guys win far too often in real life. So people aren't reading books like ours. They're not reading a book like Leave No Trace to see the bad guys win. That's their life. That's what they're exposed to every day. So that scene to me is I think it's one of the most perfect conclusions, the most perfect final shots to use a movie term that I've ever seen in thriller fiction. Because it says so much just the image of the cranes lifting it back up on a temporary pedestal, supported by scaffolding and everything. It says it all.

SPEAKER_00 37:09

I think people always crave closure to a story, and that's like perfect closure.

SPEAKER_01 37:15

Yes. Agreed.

SPEAKER_00 37:17

Now, this is the part of the show where we like to do five quick questions that never turn out to be quick, but it's a great way to get to know you as people. Are you ready? We're ready. So, question one dog or cat person?

SPEAKER_02 37:33

Dog. Doggy.

SPEAKER_00 37:35

Now, do you own any pets?

SPEAKER_02 37:37

No. No.

SPEAKER_00 37:39

So you like them, but not in your house.

SPEAKER_02 37:41

Well, Jeff has me, Diane. So I'm very high maintenance. You've got to water me twice a week and make sure there's food in my bowl. It's a big responsibility for Jeff, but he handles it well.

SPEAKER_01 37:52

My in-laws live next door to us, and we have a gate that opens between our houses, and they have two dogs. And so those dogs are over here half the time. Oh, so it's kind of like having steps. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 38:06

That's the perfect situation. It's like other people's children. They go home.

SPEAKER_00 38:10

Yeah, you get to play with them. You don't have to pick up their poop. You don't have to buy all of the food. You just get the fun part. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 38:19

And they're sweet doggies.

SPEAKER_00 38:20

Oh, that's always good. Question two: What was the last book you read for pleasure?

SPEAKER_02 38:27

Just finished Michael Connolly's Resurrection Walk, the latest Lincoln Lawyer novel.

SPEAKER_01 38:33

Since I do a lot of reviewing, and so does John, I read for pleasure nonfiction. And the last book I read that for pleasure for nonfiction was a book called Shirley You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplanes. It was a behind-the-scenes one of my absolute favorite films of all time.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

That's a thing in our house. If anybody says, you know, Shirley, like, don't call me Shirley.

SPEAKER_02 38:56

Ah, yeah. You know, let me add one thing. I also, in the nonfiction space, I just finished a book about the making of one of my favorite movies of all time, which was Chinatown. And what struck me about the book was how so much of the greatest content in film's history was an accident. That everything went wrong, and yet the movie turned out great. Jaws, The Godfather, Chinatown, Casablanca. It's amazing. You know, you may think you're in control when you make a movie, but so many things have to go right, and you're not in control of so many other things. That's why writing books is so much more fun because you are in control when you're writing a book. You are not in control when you're writing a movie or you're making a movie. And we don't have to worry about budgets.

unknown 39:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:45

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 39:46

See, now hearing selections like that, it makes me question my choice of nonfiction books because I tend to read things more like A Killer by Design by Dr. Ann Burgess. It's like how Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest of the Sphifer, The Criminal Mind, or The Poison Bible for Writers and things like that. My husband gets worried sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 40:10

My wife doesn't like thrillers at all. So uh it's fun when she's reading the stuff I write with John. And she's a scientist, and uh so she helps us with the science aspects of things. And sometimes she'll just you know give me a look like, okay, I'm I'm I'm wondering about you now.

SPEAKER_02 40:28

But that's she hates me. She hates me because she doesn't no, but the thing is I don't take no for an answer. If if I want to do something in a book, I would have no no no, don't tell me we can't do it. We're gonna do it. Tell me a credible way that we could make it sound like we know what we're talking about, you know, because we're we're dealing even in this book with things you know technologically that don't exist today. It's basically we're making something up, you know, the kind of explosion that's gonna happen in the climax if Michael doesn't succeed. It's unprecedented. There's never been anything like this. So we're making it up, and we need to find credible people to tell us how to sound like we know what we're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 41:14

And that's been so much fun to do, talking to people that uh you wouldn't necessarily be talking to otherwise. And they love talking about their expertise.

SPEAKER_00 41:22

Oh, yeah. That's why I started this podcast, was so I get to do it every week.

SPEAKER_01 41:27

Oh, there you go. Yeah, absolutely. I hear you.

SPEAKER_00 41:30

Okay, so question three. If Leave No Trace should become a movie at some point, who would you want to play the two main characters?

SPEAKER_01 41:41

Um I can answer the uh Michael Walker character. His name is Christopher Palaha. He's an actor on Hallmark Films, and he's also been in Wonder Woman 84 and uh the last Jurassic Park World movie. And uh he actually is someone who read in advance of this book and uh gave us some great feedback and said, Oh, I'd love to play him. And from that point on, like, I'd love to have you play him. So he's who I always see as Michael.

SPEAKER_02 42:10

And what about Gina? I I think for Gina, I don't know if Ava Mendez is too old to play that role now. I mean Gina Rodriguez. I think it would be very disingenuous to cast anyone but a Latina actress to play Latina, so I think it's important. Now, I I don't necessarily feel that way about we don't need to get an actor who's missing a foot to play Michael.

SPEAKER_00 42:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:33

To quote Lawrence Olivier, you don't have to die to play dead. Not all method acting, but if we were casting someone in a wheelchair, I would feel it was important to cast someone who really is in a wheelchair, if at all possible. Sometimes it's just not possible. You know, you just can't do it. But there are a lot of great Latina actresses out there, some of which I'm probably not even familiar with, but I think on Ava Mendez, Gina Rodriguez, there are a few others. And if we were not going to make her a Latina, if she wasn't, then we would have to change her background.

SPEAKER_00 43:07

So now, question four. If you had to pick one of the books that you have written and live in that world for a month, which book would you want to pick?

SPEAKER_01 43:18

Oh my God. Well, I'd have to, I'd have to say leave no trace for sure, just because there's so many parks we visit in this book, and it's just it's so exciting and fun. And honestly, I'd love to hang with uh Michael and Gina.

SPEAKER_02 43:32

You know, the worlds I fashion in thrillers are so dramatic and fast-paced, I wouldn't want to go live within any of them.

unknown 43:41

To tell you the truth.

SPEAKER_02 43:43

Um but seriously, if I had to pick, this is really this is tough. You know, I've been lucky in that I've done some smaller books. For a book called Hope Mountain on adaptive skiing, I spent time learning how to ski. And for my book. Dolphin Key, which is about dolphin human therapy, I swam with dolphins down in Key Largo. So let me answer the question this way, Diane. It's not a question of which books I'd like to find myself in. It's looking for excuses to actually do it, to immerse myself in the world as much as possible of the heroes that I'm creating. If I were a method writer as opposed to a method actor, maybe I would have tried to walk around with crutches for a week to know what Michael went through when he lost his foot. Maybe that would have informed me better. I don't have that kind of ambition. Um, I think you can there's no substitute for the imagination, I guess is what I'm getting at. But it's fun to experience as much as you can of what the character experiences because you will understand them better. But you don't have to experience their pain. As I said, you don't have to die to play dead if you're an actor.

SPEAKER_01 45:03

I would say also, if I could be stationed on the Starship Enterprise, I would do that in a heartbeat as long as I was not wearing rainy red shirts.

SPEAKER_00 45:12

No kidding, right?

SPEAKER_02 45:13

Didn't we all want to be on the Starship Enterprise? Yeah. Absolutely. At some point be the captain. It's funny. I think if you ask me that question about other people's books or about TV shows and movies, I'd have a better answer for you. But my own stuff, I'm creating worlds I don't want to live in. That's why I'm creating them. That's why people are buying the books, because bad stuff is gonna happen. You know?

SPEAKER_00 45:41

So now, question five. What is the best part about writing as a team versus writing as a solo author?

SPEAKER_02 45:52

Jeff, you've got to go first on that one.

SPEAKER_01 45:55

In all honesty, when the idea is there and you have this vision of this great story and great characters, working with John, the phrase two heads are better than one fits so perfectly here because what I envisioned and what the book actually is now is so much better and so much richer and deeper. And it has that oomph that uh when I was trying it initially, I was lacking.

SPEAKER_02 46:26

And I think from my perspective, early on in my career for years, I had a tradition where I'd always, you know, there'd be a big climax at the end of my Blaine McCracken series. And I've gone to Williamsburg for one book, and I went to Disney World for the Fires of Midnight and Washington, D.C. for Day of the Delphi. Whatever I was gonna blow up or lay waste to, I would go and visit. Well, as I've gotten older, I don't like to travel. I like to sit, I like to write, I like my life. Jeff and I were just on tour, which reminded me of why I hate to travel. Um, even though it was a great trip, it was still hectic and running from airport to the house. I apologize. Yeah, but that's okay. But he but the thing is, Jeff makes me better by enabling me not to have to do what I'm not as good at as he is. His passion for the parks and the fact that he loves visiting the park so much frankly means I don't have to go. And that's okay because if one of us has that passion and is bringing it to the table, the other one doesn't necessarily need it. So this goes back to one of the earlier questions about why we work so well together. We're just perfect fits. It's like we're two jagged edges, and when you fit us together, it's just a perfect symmetry. And it's impossible to get mad at Jeff. He should be mad at me all the time for driving him crazy. But Jeff is so patient with me and so tolerant of my whims and inability to commit to something because I write from the inside out, but he offers enough discipline that keeps me, as I said earlier, on the rails, and it makes us a perfect fit.

SPEAKER_01 48:14

I could not be happier working with Sean.

SPEAKER_00 48:18

You guys seem to work off of each other very well.

SPEAKER_02 48:22

Well, we were your first dual interview, right? The first time you've interviewed two authors at once.

SPEAKER_00 48:27

Yeah, for the podcast, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 48:29

There you go.

SPEAKER_01 48:30

And you'll never do it again.

SPEAKER_00 48:33

Actually, I was I was worried that it would be a little bit confusing for the listeners, but your voices are so different and your delivery is so different. I think it's gonna be very easy for people to tell who's speaking.

SPEAKER_02 48:45

Or they can just blur us to five parts and listen to Jeff alone.

SPEAKER_01 48:52

I I was gonna suggest that to her and uh bribe her a little bit to do so, but uh okay.

SPEAKER_00 48:58

So now let's remind everybody who you are and where they can find your book.

SPEAKER_02 49:04

Go, John. I'm John Land, and Jeff, you're Jeff Ayre. So uh but you can find the book. We're an Amazon editor's pick of the month for March. We've got to give a shout out to Amazon for recognizing us that way. But you can get the book anywhere, local bookstore. If they don't have it in stock, they can have it put to you in 24 hours. So if you prefer independence, go there. If you like Amazon, go there. If you're a Barnes and Noble, books a million person, big chain person, go there. I grew up on Walden books, mall stores. I miss them every day. But I also love indie bookstores. So wherever you buy your books, you can get leave no trace.

SPEAKER_01 49:42

And it's so much fun walking into a store, like my local independent here, and seeing it on the shelf. It's it's so exciting.

SPEAKER_00 49:50

That's what I'm hoping for one day. Whenever I actually get my writing career going, that's what I want to do. I want to be able to walk into a store and see one of my books on the shelf.

SPEAKER_02 49:59

It never gets old. I tell people that maybe that was that first time where I didn't sleep the night before I knew I was gonna see my first ever finished copies of a book. The magic of opening the box for the first time and pulling out the first copy. You know the cover, you know the inside, you know all that. But holding it in your hands. Now, Jeff, what was it like for you when that happened with Leave No Trace?

SPEAKER_01 50:24

When the box arrived, I had it in my kitchen and I was opening the box, and my daughter comes in and she goes, Oh, what's this? and starts to help me. And it's like, no, no, no, I have to do this myself. And then pulling it out of that box, I almost wept just because it's it is you're holding the vision in your hand, and it is an experience that um, yeah, I I I'll treasure forever. And I know I'll do the same for the next one.

SPEAKER_00 50:51

No doubt about it. That is just absolutely amazing. And of course, for everybody who's wanting to find you and your book, there will be live links in the description of the podcast and on our website at burkhartbooks.com. And you two are going to be in BookBanter magazine, which will also have live links to your social media and this episode. Awesome. Thank you. And just so you know, there is also a year-in book buying guide that drops in November before Thanksgiving holiday shopping begins. And you will also be in there.

SPEAKER_01 51:21

Oh, thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 51:22

Thank you, Diane. Appreciate that. See, there's benefits to coming and talking to me.

SPEAKER_02 51:29

Absolutely. You know, this has been great. We so appreciate you taking the time to look to listen to us. And I don't know what time it is over there now, but go have a stiff drink. I have that effect on people.

SPEAKER_00 51:41

Well, it's it's after four o'clock here, so that's possible.

SPEAKER_01 51:45

Yeah, I need to do that now.

SPEAKER_00 51:48

Thank you so much for being here. This has been absolutely fabulous, and I hope whenever you have another book in the series ready to go, that you will come back and talk to me again.

SPEAKER_01 51:56

We would love that. For sure.

SPEAKER_00 51:59

So there you have it, folks. My interview with the writing team behind A.J. Landau and the thriller Leave No Trace, authors Jeff Ayers and John Land. They were so much fun to talk to, and I cannot wait for the next book. I have just about finished, I have like two chapters left to read, which I'm gonna do this afternoon, to finish Leave No Trace. And oh my gosh, it is so good. I love so many elements about this book. If you love thrillers, please go pick up a copy of Leave No Trace by A.J. Landau, and you will be very grateful that you did. Now, as promised, I'm going to tell you about the other authors that I have coming up very soon. I am talking next week with Teresa Payton, who was the first female CIO in the White House, and she has a new version of her book, Manipulated, Inside the Cyber War, to hijack elections and distort the truth. That is going to be such an incredibly timely discussion to have. Her interview is going to be coming May 29th, so don't miss out. Right now, if you go pick up our latest issue of BookBanter magazine for just $2.99 on our website, Burkhartbooks.com, you can get a preview of Teresa, her background, and her book that we will be discussing on the podcast next month. Now, next week we have Nandita Godball, an incredible cookbook author who has several cookbooks out right now that help people become less stressed when making real authentic Indian food. And her recipes are fantastic and easy to follow. It does take the stress out of trying to make authentic Indian food. Because as you'll hear in our interview, I told her I've made Indian food several times, but I have never done it with confidence. So I really can use her help on that. Another incredible interview that I have coming up pretty soon. If you like true crime stories, I have a former detective from Florida who worked some very high-profile cases who's going to be coming on to talk about his book, CSI, the Casey Anthony Child Murder Case. He's also working on a second book, and I'm hoping that we can get a little preview of that one as well. So if you're a fan of true crime, keep watching our schedules for that interview to come up this summer. And of course, I'm still working on my medical memoir, Free Bad Haircut with Each Craniotomy. If you pick up our latest issue of BookBanter magazine, you can find out more about that. And I think in a future episode, we might do a little bit of a reading from my book to give you an idea of my style and how this book is going. So be sure to subscribe to this podcast. Keep following us on our social media because we have got so many incredible things coming up, and we're planning a whole lot more. So be sure to follow along because if you love books like we do, you do not want to miss this podcast or a single issue of our magazine. And now you know what time it is, folks. It's time for you all to go forth and be very happy.