A renegade CIA asset is strewing nuclear materials up and down Interstate 95. Secret documents are showing up on his doorstep. is revenge for the death of his wife,” Raffel explained on his web site. The protagonist, California college professor Sam Rockman, winds up working for the Senate Intelligence Committee after his wife is killed in a terrorist bombing. His first two novels, dot.dead and Smasher, were set in Silicon Valley (underused, but nevertheless a “great site for mysteries and thrillers,” Raffel explained) and both books drew a string of rave reviews.ĭrop By Drop, a political thriller, is set in Washington. I was still bored with my day job, so I quit and did what everyone in Silicon Valley was doing in those days-I started my own company.” Raffle also started writing. I was leafing through a college catalog one day and I came across an offering in mystery writing. “I loved the work,” he recalled, “but I was getting bored. He supported himself as a professional gambler for a while, betting mainly on horse racing, before landing a job in Silicon Valley. “It was a great ride, but what you remember is the ending.” “It was like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute,” Raffel recalled of his campaign. It was heady work for a new lawyer just out of school.įour years later, though, disillusioned with Washington and some of the people in government who were “going along with things they knew were wrong,” Raffel returned to California and mounted an unsuccessful run for Congress. Within nine months, the top two lawyers quit, so there I was.” The job involved oversight of the agencies and their budgets, along with work on legislation to regulate the country’s intelligence activities. I got a job with the Senate Intelligence Committee, the third lawyer in line.
I was an idealistic kind of guy, so I decided to go to Washington D.C.
“I worked for a Wall Street firm during the summer when I was in law school,” Raffel said, “and I didn’t like it. Some of the novel’s characters are amalgams of Washington powerbrokers Raffel got to know, and the author’s Top Secret clearance gave him an insight few of us share. But he admits that his time in Washington as Counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence greatly influenced his latest thriller, Drop By Drop. Author Keith Raffel knows, but he’s not telling. We all wonder from time to time what the CIA, the NSA, and the other alphabet-soup intelligence agencies are really up to.
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