As is often the case with second books in a series, Enemy of the State was never supposed to exist.
The first book, The Killing Room, was initially written to be a standalone.
The book opens with a businessman waking up in a hotel room that isn’t his to find a dead woman in the bathtub. Panicked, he runs. Soon a pair of detectives track him down and place him under arrest. The businessman pleads his case, saying he didn’t kill the woman, but the detectives don’t believe him. They tell him he’s going to prison. But then, after some thought, they give the man the chance to make it all go away—for a price.
Pretty standard crime thriller setup, right?
Except in this instance, things are not what they appear, and while the book starts out one way, it becomes an entirely different book partway through.
Again, my intention was to write a standalone. While I’ve written a handful of series in the past, I prefer writing standalones. Every book is a new adventure with brand-new characters to explore.
That’s what I intended when I wrote The Killing Room.
Honest.
But then, halfway through writing the book, I realized the protagonist was somebody I’d like to continue writing. His backstory intrigued me, what with the fact—semi-spoiler ahead!—he was a bad guy trying to do good.
And so, after he completed what he’d gone to Las Vegas to do, the book ends with our hero headed to the airport to fly off into the metaphorical sunset. Only before he can get on the plane, he’s contacted by somebody from his old team—an elite black-op kill squad that’s been tasked with bringing him in, dead or alive.
So that’s where the first book ended, with our hero standing in a busy terminal, a phone to his ear, being told that a kill team had been dispatched to take him out—and that they were already at the airport.
And because the first book ended on that cliffhanger, it was only natural that I opened the second book right where it left off.
Only, no, wait—that’s not quite accurate.
Enemy of the State opens with a sort of prologue that details the last mission our hero went on before he faked his death.
The purpose of opening the book this way is two-fold: first and foremost, to introduce the reader to the team that will be hunting our hero throughout the second book; plus, we see our hero’s last act of valor in saving another one of his team member’s lives—the same very team member who contacted him at the end of the first book to give him warning.
I’m one of those masochistic writers who likes to write my characters into corners with guns pointed at their heads and knives pressed to their throats to see how they manage to survive, and Enemy of the State was one giant corner with a ton of guns and knives leveled at our hero.
As is the case with all of my books, I didn’t outline the story ahead of time, though I had a general idea of where I thought our hero might end up, and it more or less worked out that way—after a lot of action, suspense, and twists.
Not too shabby for a book that was never supposed to exist.
Robert Swartwood is the USA Today bestselling author of The Serial Killer’s Wife, No Shelter, Man of Wax, and several other novels. He’s also the author of Girl Gone Mad and One Year Gone, written under the pseudonym Avery Bishop. Enemy of the State is the sequel to The Killing Room, which won the 2024 ITW Thriller Award for Best E-book Original Novel.
