Backtrack
Arliss Cutter Book 8
Marc Cameron
Kensington Pub
July 2026
Backtrack by Marc Cameron has dual timelines. One is set in Texas during 1977, featuring D. Wayne Cutter, a Parker County sheriff’s investigator and Deputy Lawrence Johnson. The other is set in the present time, 2026, featuring Supervisory Deputy United States Marshal, the head of the Fugitive Task Force in Alaska, as well as his partner Deputy U.S. Marshal Lola Teariki. Both storylines will come together as the plot progresses.
In 1977, $5 million dollars was stolen from an armored truck leaving two guards dead, one outlaw tracked down, taken out by Cutter, and another, Ricky Lee Pink (Pinky) sentenced to life. Fast forward to today, where Pinky is now out of jail and determined to find out what happened to the diamonds.
Boarding an Alaskan cruise ship, and joined by two other criminals and his girlfriend, Pinky aims for Anchorage. Arliss’s third ex-wife contacts him with suspicions that someone is following her on the same Alaskan cruise ship. After her cruise ship docks, Arliss Cutter discovers that she is indeed being followed. Arliss and Pinky become entangled in a dangerous showdown where Pinky is hellbent on getting revenge against the Cutter family and finding the diamonds.
There is action, suspense, emotion, and family with shootouts, manhunting, and tracking.
Elise Cooper: Idea for the story?
Marc Cameron: I guess I wanted to set a story on a cruise ship. My wife and I are not big cruisers, but we took one through the Panama Canal to research one of the Clancy books I was writing, and I thought, ‘man, this seems like a good setting for a mystery and thriller.’ I also wanted to introduce grumpy, Cutter’s grandfather as a real time character, not just in flashbacks. It seemed like a good marriage of the two plots. It just worked out.
EC: Is this a locked room mystery on the cruise ship?
MC: Yeah, in some respects, but, of course, they’re stopping at every place. A lot of the action, in the present plot line, takes place on the cruise ship, but also, places in Alaska that are difficult to get to, places in the southeast Alaska, where people only get there by boat. So, it was also, besides being a locked room kind of a mystery a very Alaskan trope. Tens of thousands of people a day come to Alaska via the ship, and so it’s a way to showcase it, a part of the fabric of the state.
EC: Part of the story also had people branded by sex traffickers?
MC: What I try to do, when I’m writing a book, especially a Cutter one, is incorporating what it was really like to be in law enforcement. It’s not episodic, like you see on TV, where there’s one case that you solve in 45 minutes. People who read the Cutter books know that there’s usually an A and C story.
EC: Is a US Marshall considered law enforcement?
MC: Well, we are police. We have the broadest statutory authority in the United States. It’s just that we have a lot of other duties. What I’ve tried to draw from in Alaska is the smallness of law enforcement so it’s not uncommon for us to help the troopers out on sexual assault cases or homicide cases or whatever. We’re the oldest federal law enforcement agency that started in 1789, and we have our day-to-day mandate to protect federal judges, to see to the security of the courts, protect witnesses, and all of that, so it keeps us busy. That doesn’t mean we’re not peace officers. We’re absolutely peace officers, with all the rights. We’re just like Secret Service with certain duties that keep them super busy, but if they see a felony happen in front of them, they are going to react to it and act.
EC: Next book?
MC: The C story in this book, will be the A story in the next book, which ties all that up. The working title is A Fortress of Bears, due out this time next year. Down in Southeast Alaska, there’s a big swath of land that of the Tlingit natives which means a fortress of bears. There’s just so many grizzly bears down there. This book takes them down into Southeast Alaska, into some rugged wilderness with lots of grizzly bears, more bears than there are human beings per square mile. But that’s not the most dangerous thing in the forest, and that’s when they come face to face with what’s going on with these kidnapped people. Jill, the supervisor, plays a larger role in this one.
THANK YOU!!
