Debbi Mack interviews thriller writer Avanti Centrae on the Crime Cafe podcast.

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Debbi (00:12): Hi everyone. My guest today is the best selling author of the VanOps thriller series. Her first in the series, The Lost Power has received several awards and upon its release was a Barnes & Noble bestseller. Solstice Shadows, also a Barnes & Noble bestseller after its release, as well as an Amazon bestseller, is her latest book. It's a pleasure to introduce my guest Avanti Centrae. Hi Avanti. Thank you for being here today.

Avanti (02:20): Yeah. Hi Debbi and everyone who's listening. I'm thrilled to be here to to chat a little bit more with an audience that enjoys crime as much as I do in the fiction sense, of course. Yes.

Debbi (02:33): Naturally, of course. Let's see, tell us about the VanOps series. You've been compared to authors like Dan Brown and Clive Cussler. So action packed might be a good word for it. Yes?

Avanti (02:48): Action packed. Yes. A lot of readers have said they're literally glued to the edge of their seat. I've had people tell me they are holding their breath, and that's fantastic. Yeah, the other two authors that I'm often compared to are James Rollins and Steve Berry. So it's smart pulp fiction. It's filled with intrigue and history and science and mystery kind of all wrapped up in a non-stop action package.

Debbi (03:18): Yeah, I was gonna say I started writing down what your book was like—the first one. And I wrote "like a travel guide with an adventure story, plus mysticism, history, artifact hunting, and spycraft."

Avanti (03:33): Pretty much encapsulates it. Yeah. I've always been an overachiever. Yeah. I've always been an overachiever. And yeah, I like to provide readers with, you know, their money's worth as I'm a reader, too. And I like books that are richly textured with characters that jump off the page, you know, and I've always enjoyed history, and traveling and cruising to, you know, places around the world and wanting to include all of that in my books.

Debbi (04:13): Well, you've done very well with that. I mean, you've done a great job because I was the same way. I was kind of on the edge of my seat, reading your first book there. And your protagonist is Maddy, who is an aikido expert. I thought that was really cool. What inspired you to create this particular character?

Avanti (04:35): Yeah, that's an insightful question, Debbi. And I also liked Erica Jensen in your yeah, I just read, I just read Damaged Goods and really enjoyed her, too. Maddy they, they both meditate actually. It was kind of interested to see that your character is dealing with some, you know, deep emotional stuff and uses meditation as a way to, to deal with that. And Maddy's got a little bit more of a pedestrian background than Erica does. So Maddy has been an app designer for her job. She was an almost Olympic athlete, so she's got some physical skills, and since high school she's enjoyed aikido. And the reason that I chose aikito is because I see a lot of books in our genre where the protagonist is almost callous, you know? Oh, bang bang. I had to shoot somebody again. Oh, well.

Avanti (05:36): Well, I wanted somebody that was more morally conflicted about having to use ...