Nolan Chase and Me

The Last Exile and A Lonesome Place for Murder

Preorder The Last Exile and/or preorder A Lonesome Place for Murder

Having now had a pen name for a year, I can say that it’s pretty great. Nolan Chase is low maintenance. And while I haven’t made this any sort of secret, it’s been interesting to see who caught on and what kind of overlap there is.

A Lonesome Place for Dying got some of the best reviews of my career, earned out its advance, and has solid film and TV interest. What more could one ask for?

Ocean Drive was a bit of an experiment too, being a standalone written in third person with a female main character. Some booksellers told me it was easier to hand sell that the Wakeland series, and it too garnered pretty generous praise.

In 2025 I’m going both forward and back. The second Ethan Brand novel comes out in August, and in March, Wakeland returns in The Last Exile

The Last Exile

Since Sunset and Jericho ended with Dave leaving town, I began thinking what it would take to bring him back. A personal connection and a difficult professional case. That’s the genesis of The Last Exile.

Dave Wakeland is summoned back by his partner’s cousin, a lawyer whose client is accused of killing the retired president of the Exiles biker gang and his wife.

Wakeland is a fallible character, steeped in the area’s history and social ills. That’s fun to write. So was the standalone. And so is Ethan Brand.

A Lonesome Place for Murder

The title I came up with was A Long Buried Reckoning—which I still think is good, though Crooked Lane opted for A Lonesome Place for Murder.

I think of Ethan Brand as the kind of character a young Paul Newman or Clint Eastwood would play. Ethan is the chief of police of Blaine, Washington, a tiny border town on the 49th Parallel. He’s also a former Marine with a debilitating injury he keeps hidden from others, a love affair with a married woman, and a mayor that would like to put out of a job.

He’s also someone with an affinity for animals. Here’s the pitch:

Hoping to surprise his sons, the chief of police of the small border town of Blaine, Washington is contemplating the most reckless decision of his career–buying a horse. But no good deed goes unpunished, and when the horse literally stumbles upon an abandoned smuggling tunnel, Ethan and his lead investigator Brenda Lee Page discover a dead body connected to a decade-old mystery.

Neither cover has been finalized, but you can preorder The Last Exile and/or preorder A Lonesome Place for Murder