Yeah, I’m back. Been busy writing books instead of blogs. Hope to do more here.

While I continue to whittle away at Force Majeure, the sequel to my debut thriller Force No One, my primary attention has been on a terrifically exciting new series. The first one is called The GHOST Protocol. It involves a retired US Navy intelligence officer who, bored with her retirement, is recruited by a shadowy “action office” called TRIAD.

What could go wrong, right?

What’s an action office? Action offices may have commandos or spies at their beck and call or own them natively, and may order them into the wild to perform missions impossible that do not make the nightly news. There are not nearly as many action offices as Hollywood imagines, but there are more of them in the world, and operating from more locations, than suspected in a thriller novelist’s fever dream.

The US pays project dollars in the many hundreds of millions, sometimes in a single project, to create the next advantage for warriors on a future battlefield. As a condition of lavish funding, participants in certain super-critical programs are required to submit to extraordinary security monitoring to ensure they remain loyal to their paymasters, if not their nation, because Russian, Chinese, Iranian, North Korean, and lesser spies were guaranteed to buzz around like flies. To monitor and safeguard those projects, DARPA created the lofty-sounding Technology, Research, and International Affairs Directorate.

US Navy Commander Jillian “Jilly” Hendrix is a retired Navy Intelligence operator hired to monitor a super-secret DARPA research project, the Genetic Holographical Overlay for Special Tactics—the GHOST Protocol. The Protocol is a method for perfect invisibility for soldier and machine alike, and it’s science faction—this actual research is being conducted by government researchers right now.

When the first large-scale test fails catastrophically, it accidentally renders Jilly invisible and imprints her with the Protocol.

She learns to navigate a visible world without being captured by TRIAD and now other-nation pursuers who only want to make her a science project. Invisible spies will change the world, and that means adversaries will do irrational things to get this research for their own. No secret can be safe, and no enemy. This doesn’t just change the game—it obliterates the stadiums, all the players, and says kiss my ring or else.

TRIAD and Jilly ultimately reach an uneasy truce with each other, and for the same reason: Each of them can never be sure what the other might do next. The President of the United States recalls her from retirement to active duty as a Navy admiral and puts her in charge of his new Top Secret joint-service invisible-action office—the Experimental Composite Squadron (VX-99): The Blackbirds.

My friend I.S. Berry (read her page-turning espionage debut, The Peacock and the Sparrow) said of The GHOST Protocol, “What an original story! H.G. Wells meets Tom Clancy. Ross has reinvented the classic tale of invisibility, incorporating the modern elements of AI, the evolving nature of technology, and the morality of secrecy. A thought-provoking, fast-paced read.”

The GHOST Protocol is complete and smooth, and is making the rounds of prospective agents (tell your friends). The Blackbirds sequel is well underway and making terrific progress. I’ll try to post a few excerpts under Stories.

Thanks for checking in. I promise I’ll check in more, too.