Thanks so much for joining us again for another Nora “Sierra” Byrd adventure.

It’s been such a pleasure to entertain you over the last few hours, and of course, we love spending time with Byrd and her crew.

Once again, it’s been really fun for us to collaborate on the book together. It’s a very different process to writing alone, as we both have so many ideas that we want to include in the story. But as always with writing, what you leave out is as important as what you put in. 

I’d love to tell you that we retreated to a house in the Caribbean for a few weeks to get the story together—in the same way that Ian Fleming did when he wrote the James Bond books. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. As John lives in Japan with his young family and Luke lives in England (when he’s not traveling about), we worked most of this story out through video calls and shared documents. 

One day, though, we’ve committed to actually heading out to the Caribbean to write one of these stories in person. You never know, maybe we’ll invite you along for the ride! 

In case you didn’t know, Nora ‘Sierra’ Byrd originally featured in Luke’s Eden Black Archaeological Thrillers series. She first appears in the Atlantis Agenda, when Eden, Baxter, and Athena lose their helicopter in Mexico City. Stranded and in need of a way out, they find Byrd’s Flight and Parachute School. With no better option, they break in under cover of darkness. They head for the hangar, planning to “borrow” a plane when Byrd accosts them with a shotgun—which, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is totally her style. Realizing that they’re good people in a bad situation, and taking a liking to ex-RAF pilot Baxter, Byrd offers to help them and has been in one way or another ever since. 

You may have noticed, however, that in these books the “Sierra” part of her name is new. That was John’s idea—he felt that just calling her “Nora” didn’t quite have the punch you want in an action story. He was right, of course. At some point, Luke needs to go back and sprinkle a few “Sierras” into the earlier books. Until then, chalk it up to one of those quirks that comes with spin-offs and long-running series.

Before we launch into one of our favorite parts of the writing process—telling you the truth behind the story—we want to answer a question that has been frequently asked since the publication of the Shadow of the Sunstone. 

How did you two end up writing together?

The answer to that one lies with a good friend of ours — fellow thriller writer Steven Moore. He has a lot to answer for! Steve and John met many years ago in Korea where they taught English together. When Luke and Steve crossed paths in 2018, Steve realized he had two keen travelers and writers who didn’t yet know each other. So he made the introduction, but it wasn’t until Luke began developing the Sierra Byrd series in 2023 and wanted a co-author to help bring it to life, that we actually started working together. 

Now, buckle in for one of our favorite parts of the writing process: telling you the truth behind the story. 

Let’s start, as always, at the beginning, which in this case is the wickedest city on earth! Port Royal, Jamaica, was a real place — and its reputation as the wickedest city on earth was entirely deserved. In the late 1600s, it was the wealthiest city in the Caribbean, a haven for pirates, privateers, merchants, and mercenaries, where fortunes were won and lost in a single night and the rum never stopped flowing. As an aside, just imagine being there, sharing a bottle of rum with a cast of characters from all around the world…

For someone living in the seventeenth century, I expect this would feel like a different planet entirely. We tried to capture that intrigue in the prologue of this story. We hope it came across.

But Port Royal was not to last as on June 7, 1692, one of history’s most dramatic disasters struck without warning. A catastrophic earthquake, followed by a tsunami, swallowed two-thirds of the city in a matter of minutes. Entire streets, taverns, and warehouses simply slid beneath the water, taking thousands of people with them. Contemporary accounts describe buildings disappearing into the ground as though the earth itself had opened up and swallowed them whole. When we first came across this story, we genuinely had to check it wasn’t fiction. Port Royal still lies beneath the waters off Jamaica’s coast — one of the best-preserved underwater archaeological sites in the world — and divers find artifacts there to this day.

One of the many wonderful things about being a writer is the ability to shine a light on people, history, or stories that are otherwise not often heard. And to be able to do that in a way that’s exciting, and brings that history back to life, is nothing short of a miracle. It was wonderful here to be able to give the Taíno people some of the limelight they deserve. The Taíno were the indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean islands — Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico — and the first people Columbus encountered when he arrived in 1492. Within a century, their population had been devastated almost beyond recognition by Spanish conquest, forced labor, and diseases brought by Europeans. But their culture, their beliefs, and their stories survived — and it’s those stories that drew us in.  At the heart of Taíno spiritual life were objects called cemíes — carved figures, often made from stone, wood, bone, or shell, that were believed to be vessels for the spirits of ancestors and the forces of the natural world. These weren’t decorations or trinkets; they were alive in the most meaningful sense of the word. A cemí could bring rain, ensure a good harvest, protect a community, or carry a curse. Realizing this, when the Spanish conquered the Taíno, they didn’t just take land and lives — they systematically destroyed these sacred objects, understanding that to break a people’s spiritual objects was to break the people themselves. Many cemíes were lost forever, which makes archaeological thriller writers like us sit up and ask the question, what if one of these objects was to be found today? Would it really have some kind of power, and what might that be used for? 

That brings us on to the real figure of Queen Anacaona, who was one of the most remarkable figures to emerge from Taíno history. Whether she really has any direct descendants that can be traced today, we don’t know, but that certainly is an intriguing prospect. Anacaona ruled in Hispaniola at the time of the Spanish conquest, and by all accounts she was extraordinary. She attempted to build bridges with the Spanish colonizers, hosting them, negotiating with them, trying to find a way for her people to survive in a world that was being dismantled around them. The Spanish repaid her with betrayal. In 1503, Governor Nicolás de Ovando invited her to a feast — and had her arrested and executed, along with dozens of her chiefs. She was, by most estimates, still in her thirties. Her name means golden flower in the Taíno language, and she has never been forgotten — celebrated to this day in the Caribbean as a symbol of resistance and dignity. When Isabella discovers she carries Anacaona’s bloodline in this story, we wanted that revelation to carry real weight and meaning, and as we saw in the story, she inherited her ancestor’s strength too.

Sometimes during the research process you find a landscape that fits the story perfectly—as though we couldn’t have invented anything better if we’d tried. Cockpit Country, Jamaica, is one of these places—no amount of imagination could improve on the reality. Cockpit Country is one of the most extraordinary and impenetrable landscapes in the Caribbean. Located in the interior of Jamaica, it’s a vast limestone wilderness of steep-sided, bowl-shaped valleys — the “cockpits” — separated by jagged, forested ridges that make navigation almost impossible. There are no roads through much of it and the landscape makes GPS unreadable. It is, by any reasonable measure, the kind of place that is easy to get lost in, and perhaps never come out. 

Cockpit Country also carries a history as dramatic as its geography. For over a century, it was the stronghold of the Maroons — formerly enslaved Africans who escaped the plantations and fought the British to a standstill from these hills, using the terrain as a weapon. The British, the conquerors of continents, could not conquer Cockpit Country. In 1739, they signed a peace treaty with the Maroons instead. 

As always, the aircraft we’ve used in this book are all real. Byrd’s relationship with her aircraft is probably the most important one in this series—maybe only Bourdell enjoys the same privileges! 

Although Byrd’s C-47 Skytrain didn’t get an outing in these pages, it’s certainly a special aircraft that will come out again in future books. 

The Piper J-3 Cub that carries Byrd into Valdonian airspace in this story is almost the C-47’s opposite in every way — tiny, fragile, fabric-covered, and powered by an engine not much bigger than a family car. First produced in 1937, it became one of the most popular light aircraft ever made, used to train tens of thousands of pilots during the war and beloved by aviators ever since for its simple design.

One of the most interesting planes featured in this book is the de Havilland Vampire. Developed during the Second World War and entering RAF service in 1946, it was one of Britain’s first operational jet aircraft, and its design is unlike almost anything else in the sky. With a twin-boom tail and a rounded fuselage it looks less like a warplane and more like something a child might dream up, which is perhaps why it has always captured people’s hearts. Powered by a single de Havilland Goblin turbojet, it was fast, agile, and genuinely revolutionary for its time, representing the moment Britain leapt from the propeller age into the jet age almost overnight. Unlike so many aircraft of its era, a remarkable number of them are still flying. They’re maintained by museums, private collectors, and the kind of people who simply cannot bear to let beautiful machines disappear — people like Byrd, which is why we had to put her in the cockpit! 

Although interested in vintage flying machines, we’re not pilots, or experts of any kind, so please forgive any assumptions we’ve made about how these machines work, or if we’ve got them to do things that wouldn’t usually be possible. That, to us, is all part of building a fun fictional adventure.

Finally we get to the question that drives this whole story: does the Jade Idol really hold some kind of power? 

The honest answer is… we don’t know, and perhaps that’s exactly the point. What I can tell you is that the Taíno cemíes were real, and the reverence with which they were treated was real, and the lengths to which the Spanish went to destroy them were real. Objects that inspire that level of devotion on one side and that level of fear on the other, certainly hold a kind of power, whether or not you believe them to be supernatural. As Grix understands — and as history has demonstrated time and again — you don’t need a curse to be real to use it as a weapon. By believing it, people give it the power. 

That said, having worked on several stories about ancient civilizations and their beliefs, we’ve seen that these are far more than the simplistic, irrational ideas modern science sometimes implies. When you find yourself reading about something that is so revered by some and so feared by others, it just makes you wonder that if these objects were little more than trinkets, then why did the conquerors go to such lengths to destroy them, and why did the Taíno go to such lengths to hide others that might still be out there? It certainly makes us think that things aren’t as simple as real or not. 

Of course, our Jade Idol is fictional, but we’re certain there are others like it, still hidden somewhere out there, waiting to be discovered. And if one of them ever comes to light, carved with great care by hands long gone, we suggest it’s treated with the respect it deserves, just in case. 

Thanks for joining us for this adventure — we hope Sierra, Isabella, Bourdell, and the rest of the gang took you somewhere you weren’t expecting. At the time of writing, we’re already planning for the next adventure. If this mix of legend, history, and high-stakes action has left you wanting more, we promise it’s going to be worth the wait. The history of the Caribbean is vast, its secrets are many, and Sierra Byrd’s hangar is full of aircraft that haven’t had their moment yet. Until then, keep your eyes on the horizon, your feet off the ground, and trust the pilot, because she knows what she’s doing—most of the time at least. 

Thanks for your company, see you on the next one! 

Luke and John 

May, 2026.