I began writing Rough Justice in the late eighties. I’d written screenplays — Corey Logan, which eventually became Inside Passage in 2013, was finished as a screenplay in Aug. 1989 — but Rough Justice was my first novel. The earliest scenes I can locate of Rough Justice were written later in 1989. It was a vast sprawling novel, moving between Chicago, LA, Paris, Vancouver, Hong Kong and Vietnam. After eventually finishing a 490 page version, I put it aside. It was unwieldy, too bold, too ambitious and truthfully, beyond my capacities as a beginning novelist.
After finishing Danger In Plain Sight in 2020, I was looking for a way to do a sequel, a way to continue the story I’d started with Callie and Cash. Something drew me back to Rough Justice. I’d done a rewrite in 2018, but unsatisfied, I’d put it aside again. There was, however, a character, a young half Algerian woman, Sara, who stayed with me. The villains, Rosie and Yu, were also unforgettable. Early on, Rosie and Yu arrange for Sara to have a visa to work near Seattle, then they sell her identity and arrange to kill her.
My breakthrough was realizing that Sara could be connected to Cash and Callie. That she could outwit the killer, and be alone in Seattle with no identity, no friends, knowing no one. She does, however, have one contact, a man who wrote a letter to her mother 25 years ago. Her mother never replied. The man who wrote that letter was Cash Logan.
So, imagine Cash and Callie’s surprise when they get an unexpected, half-Algerian female guest, 25-year-old Sara, showing up at the restaurant and insisting on telling them her shocking, unbelievable story. Someone is trying to kill her, and they’ve stolen her identity. She needs their help now, and she has a stunning, life-changing secret to tell.
Yet, again, Cash and Callie assemble their unconventional ragtag family — including peg-legged Andre, and Itzac, “The Macher.” Together, they go to war with formidable adversaries to save Sara, and ultimately their own lives. The fierce battle leads them to Cuba where they have to launch an audacious offensive that shocks even them … and will absolutely take your breath away.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. When Cash and Callie decided to help Sara, I had my second breakthrough. I made the decision that defined this book, that made it unique for me. The conventional version would be that after they allow Sara to participate in their unconventional family, there are a series of conflicts — Callie resenting Sara’s time with Cash, Lew resenting Sara’s time with his parents, Sara having difficulty relating to Andre or the Macher, and so on. I chose to go another way because I believed that this unconventional family was unusually high functioning. They could make Sara feel welcome, comfortable and increasingly self-aware. At the same time, Sara, raised in an orphanage, could come into her own, and, in so doing, as Cash puts it, “She’s like something in a fairy tale, or a European allegorical movie, the unknown young woman that comes out of nowhere then, effortlessly, makes everyone around her better off, happier.”
So this is a celebration of how self-aware, psychologically astute, healthy, people, however unconventional, can help each other grow and change in joyous positive ways. I sincerely hope that you’ll enjoy, that you’ll feel good about, how that happens for these people in this book.
