When the first book in the series, Rules of Prey, was published, I was still a fairly inexperienced writer of fiction. Further, I had no idea where the series was taking me, or how to manage a series.

So what did I do with my second novel? This one? Well, I made a mistake — I tried to make a thriller into a social commentary. You won't see the mistake, because the first version of Shadow was never published.

A thriller can be a social commentary, I believe, but it's difficult to do. A social commentary needs an argument, needs details, needs explanations. Needs lots and lots of words, big blocks of grey type. A thriller needs velocity and action. Cracking-wise is fine in a thriller; it doesn't work so well in a sober social commentary.

A good thriller should carry the reader along, like a whitewater river. The can't-put-it-down characteristic is critical. A social commentary is naturally dry; and if your reader happens to have a different social opinion, it's also disagreeable. In other words, the book is put-downable.

When I finished the first version of Shadow, I knew that something wasn't right. I sent it off anyway. My editor's reaction was luke-warm. I didn't want luke-warm. I took the book back, tore it to pieces, and then put it back together.

The FBI chief in this book? The focus of the main action? He wasn't even there in the first version...

Because it occurred in the midst of the American Civil War, you don't hear much about it, compared to the later Indian Wars in the West. The Sioux Uprising in Minnesota, however, may have been the deadliest of them all.

There were at least 447 deaths among white settlers, and probably more — almost twice as many as in the Custer fight. The number of Sioux casualties are unknown, but directly and indirectly, were very large. During the hostilities, captured Indians were held in a concentration camp less than a mile from what is now Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, in the heart of the Twin Cities, and like later concentration camps, it was a place of terror, rape and death.

After the Uprising, Mankato, Minnesota, became the scene of the largest mass execution in American history, when 38 Sioux were hanged in a single drop from a huge scaffold, with the approval of President Lincoln.

Reverberations from the war continue to be felt in Minnesota to this very day, with its large number of Sioux and Ojibwe residents.

The interviews and discussions that Coleman and I had with a large number of Sioux became the background for Shadow Prey. That alone wouldn't have affected the thriller qualities of the book — as long as the social commentary didn't become too obtrusive. But because I'd been so heavily immersed in the material, I kept putting more and more of it in.

That killed the original version; killed the speed and the thrills.

I solved the problem by introducing a whole new arc to the book, and, frankly, by throwing most of the social commentary overboard. In the revised version, the Sioux characters carry obvious and deadly grudges, and the reader is given enough to understand them, but no more.

If you really want to get an idea of what happened back then... you're gonna have to read a history book. Shadow Prey is now a thriller.

His name is Neil Nyren, and he may not agree with my social commentary / thriller theory.

We'll see.