AUTHOR’S NOTE
The idea for this novel came to me some fifteen years ago, when I watched a BBC documentary exploring the possibility that an earthquake and landslide on a small island off northwest Africa could cause a massive tsunami, one that might devastate the entire Eastern Seaboard of the United States. The collapse of the World Trade Center towers was still fresh in my mind. My God, I thought, if terrorists could find a way to trigger that tsunami, the death toll would be orders of magnitude worse than 9/11.
I made a research trip to La Palma in 2007, intending to quit talking and start writing, but I got sidetracked for a decade, writing a series of other books, in a long and fascinating partnership with one of the world’s greatest forensic scientists.
Meanwhile, unlike countless other story ideas that have come and gone, the La Palma plot wouldn’t let me go. So in 2016, as soon as I’d finished writing the tenth Body Farm novel, I took another trip to La Palma. I revisited the immense Taburiente caldera, rehiked the Ruta de los Volcanes, and got an insider’s view of the island’s amazing, otherworldly observatory complex.
I’ve been asked, more than once as I’ve talked about this project, “Why would you want to give ideas to terrorists?” My answer always goes something like this: “Look, if I can think of this, so can plenty of highly motivated terrorists.” Far better, in my opinion to acknowledge the possibility and minimize the risk—by guarding against it—than to pretend it doesn’t exist . . . and blindly hope that no one’s trying to make it happen. Crossed fingers are seldom an effective defense strategy.
Ironically, I’m writing this note just days after reading that the Trump Administration has proposed crippling budget cuts to a tsunami warning network—one that could save many, many lives if a large tsunami were heading for the East Coast. Eternal vigilance may be the price of liberty, but sophisticated monitoring is the price of disaster preparedness.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2017 Grayson Holt
Jon Jefferson is a prolific author, veteran journalist, and seasoned documentary writer/producer. His two-part National Geographic documentary—Biography of a Corpse and Anatomy of a Corpse—took millions of viewers behind the razor-wire fence of the University of Tennessee’s renowned Anthropological Research Facility, better known as the Body Farm.
Under the pen name Jefferson Bass—collaborating with forensic legend Bill Bass—he has written ten crime novels in the New York Times bestselling Body Farm series. He has also written two true-crime books about Bass’s career and cases.
A runner, cyclist, and pilot, Jefferson lives and writes in Athens, Georgia.
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