I wrote a blog post back in 2017, right after I started Bionic Bug: When Technothriller meets Cozy Mystery. I was trying to explain to myself and my readers what I was doing by mashing together two genres that really don’t belong in the same book, let alone on the same shelf in a bookstore.

Why not, you ask? Because these two genres don’t agree on anything except for the element of suspense.

• A cozy mystery is small in scale. You have an amateur sleuth, a community where everyone knows everyone, and a cast of eclectic supporting characters (the memorable kind). The cozy genre promises its readers that the violence mostly happens off the page. Like Agatha Christie.
• A technothriller is the polar opposite. It is global in scale, driven by whatever new technology is about to ruin everyone’s life, and the violence is all over the page. There’s not much character development. The cast comprises a hero, an antagonist, and supporting characters. No one except the hero is memorable (if the author gets lucky). Like Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton.
• A mystery is about a murder or a crime that needs solving, whereas a thriller is about a world that needs saving.
• A mystery unfolds in which the author reveals clues layer by layer; the sleuth (and the reader) pieces them together a little at a time.
• A thriller races. It doesn’t hide the antagonist; readers know exactly who he or she is; they’re just watching the clock to see if the hero can stop them.
• A mystery takes its time, and the suspense simmers until the climax. A thriller gets your heart pounding from page one.

But I wanted to have both in the same book. It wasn’t until 2026 that I realized why:

• I want to keep coming back to characters that I care about. I like it when the characters all know each other and interact throughout a series.
• I’m fascinated by how technology shapes us, our society, politics, and crime.
• I want to be involved in solving the mystery.
• I love layered storytelling.
• I like a heart-pounding excitement to get me to turn the pages.

Neither the thriller nor the cozy genre alone meets these requirements.

Basically, I was writing the books that I wanted to read but couldn’t find anywhere—probably because publishers consider these genres to be incompatible; they are two separate markets. Leave it to me as a new author back in 2027 to break rules before I learn them, but that’s always been a stubborn personality trait of mine.

So… how well did I do? It’s 2026 now, and book five is here! In just a few weeks, you can read through the entire series and tell me that yourself.

I feel pretty happy with how the story developed and where the series ended up. Here’s my spoiler-free retrospective on its evolution.

The story’s location and cast anchor a cozy mystery

Interestingly, the location of Washington D.C. lends itself to blending these genres. For those of us who live/lived there, DC is small enough to generate a local story feeling while still being capable of supporting stories that reach the national and global levels. Since I lived in D.C. for eleven years and worked for the Pentagon, I know how to make it feel small and big at the same time.

For me, an eccentric cast is the top feature that grounds a cozy mystery and gives it that “cozy” feeling that we keep coming back for:

• Lara Kingsley is a licensed PI in D.C., specializing in surveillance systems (she’s a former Army special forces Green Beret, which comes into play throughout the story). She’s also an amateur sleuth who gets pulled into murder cases through personal connections. She’s sarcastic, skeptical, resistant to authority and to being told what to do.
• Vikram “Vik” Abhay is Lara’s sidekick and computer/tech guy, who originally financed his Georgetown grad studies by working for Kingsley Investigations. He’s cheerful, occasionally oversteps boundaries, and aspires to build his own AI-driven crime prediction system. He provides comic relief, technical exposition, and also has his own arc.
• Detective Mario Sanchez is a D.C. Metro homicide detective and Lara’s “wily nemesis.” He doesn’t love PIs meddling in his cases, is gruff and often exasperated (especially by the tech he doesn’t understand). He becomes a grudging, reliable ally to Lara over the course of the series.
• Robert “Rob” Martin is Lara’s charming ex-boyfriend, FBI Special Agent and WMD coordinator for the Washington Field Office. He’s a rule-follower (in contrast to Lara) and provides a recurring source of both romantic tension and ethical friction.
• Dr. Maggie Brown is Lara’s best friend, director of a genetics lab at the University of Maryland. She fulfills the “brilliant best friend” archetype, providing scientific grounding/exposition and emotional support.
• Randall Hickerson is a senior CIA case officer who first appears in Project Gecko. Sarcastic. He’s morally slippery and gives off plenty of “spook” energy. Lara and most of the cast (Sanchez, Rob, Finn) distrust him outright.

Not all cozy mysteries feature character development, but some do. Not so much for thrillers, which often treat characters as subservient to the plot. We read them and toss them. I want to read thrillers with characters. That’s why I wrote the Lara Kingsley Series.

Lara’s journey throughout the series takes her from amateur sleuth to operative. Her Army Special Forces background certainly helped in that regard, but I didn’t anticipate such a strong transformation. I gave her this background mostly because I enjoy writing badass female protagonists. It’s almost like she couldn’t help herself.

• Bionic Bug: She starts out the series as a licensed PI (still serving in the Army National Guard) and gets pulled into solving crimes for personal reasons (her friend’s murder). This is the classic amateur-sleuth setup.
• Project Gecko: She gets recruited into an espionage operation by a general. This is the first time she’s asked to act rather than investigate. Spoiler: She gets herself into some real trouble.
• Genomic Data: The book starts with the same PI footing, but the case brushes up against her own biology/medical mystery. As her personal stakes creep in, she makes her first trip overseas.
• Black Box: By this time, Lara is solving mysteries that tie back to her friend’s death and her genetic illness. Everything seems to be connected, and nothing is as it seems.
• Project Chimera: In this explosive finale, Lara operates alongside Delta Force to support a CIA black operation to counter a geopolitical conspiracy. Now, she’s functionally an asset, not a PI.

This series began with my fascination with emerging technologies. In 2016, I wrote the story as starting in 2027. That makes the series technically science fiction, but the technologies feel like they’ll emerge in the next few years; nothing is far-fetched. For this reason, I prefer calling the series speculative. It’s fun to see the technologies enter our society after I wrote about them. Currently, I live in the Bay Area and get to drive next to self-driving cars.

• Bionic Bug: Dark web, drones, genetically modified, remote-controlled and autonomous beetles — one rogue scientist, one victim, contained to D.C. to the federal government.
• Project Gecko: nanotech, invisibility cloaking, neural implants — and this is where nation-state stakes creep in explicitly (China, PLA, black ops), pulling Lara from PI work into something closer to an operative.
• Genomic Data: CRISPR, cloning, and germ-line engineering — “designer babies,” the moral stakes widen to cover societal policy, not just one villain
• Black Box: humanoid AGI robots (Rosie) — raises legal/ethical questions about accountability, but still a single-company, single-murder scope.
• Project Chimera: everything converges — genetic modification + robotics + nuclear fusion, deployed as an Arctic superhuman-soldier-and-robot-army conspiracy. Global power struggle, not a murder case anymore.

In 2017, promised that the good guys had to win, no question, and the ending had to feel earned and hopeful. I wrote that down without really trusting I could pull it off. By the time I got to Book 5, I’d spent four books piling complications onto Lara’s life and killing off people she loved. I didn’t think I had a happy ending left in me. At most, I thought it might be bittersweet.

But I wrote one with a happy ending—or the happiest sort you’ll ever get from me. Lara gets something she’s been wanting since page one of Bionic Bug — and I have to say, I didn’t see it coming. That’s how you know a character’s become real.

This series started on a whim ten years ago while I was supposed to be finishing a political thriller trilogy that never got published (lol). Because I got distracted by other shiny objects (Rescind Order, Westphalia, Asterwelt, and the Lucksmiths, the series followed me across four jobs and three states — I wrote it from D.C., then Rockport, Texas, and now I’m finishing it in the Bay Area, which is funny because that’s more or less where a young Lara Kingsley grew up. I didn’t plan that. Maybe she did.

Project Chimera, the explosive finale of the Lara Kingsley series, is out September 15.