At first blush, Coronado may not seem an obvious place to set a thriller, but novelist Steve Martini decided it would be the perfect place for the protagonist of his bestselling book series, attorney Paul Madriani, to set up shop.
“It had the feel of quaint village next to a large urban center,” Martini said in a phone interview. With its strong naval presence and proximity to the U.S./Mexican boarder, operating out of Coronado allowed Madriani to get involved with drug smuggling, terrorism and other topical issues.
The bestselling, critically acclaimed author of the 13-book Paul Madriani series of novels, as well as four other novels, will be in Coronado on Friday, May 30, to talk about his latest thriller The Enemy Inside. The signing is the first official event for Celebrate Coronado 125, a half-year tribute the city and its history on its 125th birthday.
Madriani’s fictional office is located just upstairs from Coronado’s popular Miguel’s Restaurant. The author has visited Coronado many times to soak up the atmosphere, which he sees as a necessary part of the writing process.
“You have to ground your story in reality, if you want your readers to suspend their sense of disbelief,” said the San Francisco native. “You can’t have the traffic flowing north when everyone knows that traffic flows south.” Details matter.
Like Madriani, Martini is a lawyer, or at least he was before his first novel The Simeon Chamber became an international bestseller. He wrote at night while keeping up his law practice during the day. Martini’s law career was brief, just ten years, and somewhat mundane. He spent a couple of years at small general practice firm, where he practiced some criminal law. But most of his career was spent work for various state agencies and as a administrative law judge.
“In all honesty, I never enjoyed the practice of law as much as I did writing,” he said.
Before becoming a lawyer, Martini was the Sacramento correspondent for the Los Angeles Journal, a legal newspaper. He loved being a reporter.
“It gave me a sense of gratification to meet a deadline and see something in print,” he said.
Reporting from the state capital allowed him to immerse himself in his other passion — politics. “I’m a political junkie,” Martini says unapologetically.
In the 1970s, Sacramento was one of the best places for a political junkie to land. Martini covered the last two years of Ronald Reagan’s governorship and the full eight years of Jerry Brown’s first turn as governor. Though ideological opposites, Brown and Reagan had much in common. Both were ambitious politicians. Both ran for president. Both attracted powerful political operatives.
Watching them Martini saw first hand the lay of the political landscape where giant egos and unbridled ambition fuel the process. His experience in Sacramento has continued to inform his novels, including his latest one.
In The Enemy Inside, Madriani has been hired to defend Alex Ives, a political blogger, who has been falsely implicated in the death of Olinda Serna, a prominent Washington, DC, lawyer and high-powered political operative. Her death on a deserted San Diego freeway unleashes a panic among Washington elite who fear her knowledge of their skullduggery will come to light following her death.
In defending his client, Madriani is drawn into what Publisher’s Weekly called “a search that will lead him to a vortex of corruption, and at its center, a devious killer set to strike again.” Among the secrets this “vortex of corruption” tries to hide is its use of offshore accounts to influence government officials.
This is not the first time a Martini novel has presaged a headline. Years before Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s electronic-snooping, government surveillance was a continuous theme in Martini’s trilogy that included Guardian of Lies, The Rule of Nine, and Trader of Secrets.
“In those stories it becomes clear to Paul that his phone and e-mails have been compromised, presumably by federal authorities,” Martini said.
Readers have asked him if he had any insider information about the surveillance program, but Martini maintains that he did not; rather, he relied on careful research and a reporter’s instinct.
“I assumed that given the technology available and the concerns over international terrorism, that the NSA was probably engaged in such activities. In all candor, they would be naïve if they were not,” he said.
Despite his cynical view of the process and many of its players, Martini is not anti-government. “There is nothing wrong with government,” he said. “There is a concentration of power that appeals to people’s lesser angels and sows the seeds of corruption. That is when bad stuff happens,” he said.
Martini’s talk and book signing will be held at the Coronado Public Library’s Winn Room from 2 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, May 30.
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Gloria Tierney
Staff Writer
eCoronado.com
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