From the time our first child, Jennifer, was born in 1970 I found myself creating children’s stories to tell her at bedtime or when we were taking an after–dinner walk. When our son James was born five years later, I continued with evening and bedtime stories – particularly Christmas stories about Santa Claus. My wife and I found a great deal of joy pointing out the flashing red lights atop the Santa Catalina Mountains and exciting the children about the possibility that Santa was flying up there and was looking down on us. Of course, he was keeping a list of who was naughty and nice, so there was a little encouragement for the kids to be well behaved.

At about the same time, I was busy at the Tucson Police Department writing policies and procedures, deployment plans, budgets, and working on a major research project on Community Oriented Policing.

Storytelling came to an end when James and Jennifer outgrew them, but my technical writing for the Tucson, and later the Lubbock Police Departments, moved into high gear. After retiring as Chief of Police of the Lubbock PD and making a career adjustment to the Lubbock School District Police, I found a treasure chest in the form of “spare time.”

I had never lost my pleasure of storytelling, so my newly found time was put to use in creative writing. My first book, Color of the Prism, was a major success and sold to become a motion picture. My second novel, The Third Dawn, a biblical novel, has remained popular and is doing well, especially in the Easter and Christmas seasons. 

My first book in the Christie Cole Trilogy was Voices in the Fog, a spin-off of the Manchurian Candidate. Its lead character, Christie Cole, is the protagonist in the second book of the trilogy, Arrows of Allah. Based upon the search for al-Qaeda, this is a fact-based novel so close to the truth that it created unwanted interest in Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E, Russia, and China.

My next publication, Sweet Emily, follows Detective Mike Palotti as he leads a multi-agency investigation in a serial killer. As in Color of the Prism, Sweet Emily is a fact-based novel taken from several serial murder cases in the United States. Like Color of the Prism, it too closes with a non-traditional ending.  

Following the successes of my earlier works, I completed the Christie Cole Trilogy with The Spy Among Us. Staying with the model of my previous novels, The Spy Among Us closely parallels the international espionage of computerized information theft, and the impact it had on governments throughout the U. S. and other countries.

What does the future hold? The second book in the Border War series coming on the trail of Color of the Prism is We Were Young Once . . .. The Border War series will close out in 2021 with The Russian, another fact-based novel of drug and human trafficking.

Thomas J. Nichols