Meet Max Boucher

The Character Who Won’t Leave Me Alone

I didn’t plan Max Boucher.

That’s the truth. He wasn’t on a whiteboard or in a character bible or scrawled on a napkin at some late-night brainstorming session. He showed up the way most of my best characters do—uninvited, fully formed, and impossible to ignore.

Here’s what happened: a publisher sent me a writing prompt for a series they wanted to develop. The idea was interesting enough that I sat down and started writing, and almost immediately this guy appeared on the page. A former Seattle homicide detective who’d lost everything—his daughter murdered, his wife vanished—and had rebuilt himself into a PI who took cases involving missing pets because that’s what paid the rent. He was broken in a very specific way. Not self-pitying. Not reckless. Just… unable to let go.

The publishing deal fizzled. It didn’t go anywhere. But Max’s story? That was already alive. He was already in my head, refusing to leave.

So I kept writing.

That became Harvested—a book about missing dogs in Seattle that turns into something much darker. And then Teaching Moments, where Max takes a missing-horse case in small-town Idaho and walks into a murder that nobody’s telling the truth about. And now Baker Street, the prequel, coming this May, which goes back to the moment after Max lost his wife—when his client’s father is murdered, and the case becomes more personal than anything he’s faced.

Three books in, and I’m not done. I don’t think Max is either.

People ask me what makes Max different from other thriller protagonists. I think about that a lot, actually. The genre is full of brilliant detectives and ex-cops and haunted investigators, and I love them—Bosch, Reacher, Lisbeth Salander, all of them. But Max isn’t the smartest person in the room. He’s not the toughest. He doesn’t have a special set of skills or a photographic memory or a dark past that makes him cool.

He’s just a man who can’t let go of a case.

Every investigation Max takes turns personal. That’s not a coincidence—it’s who he is. He can’t separate the work from himself. The missing dogs in Harvested pull him back to his own loss. The murder in Teaching Moments forces him to confront how grief distorts the way he sees evidence. And in Baker Street, the victim’s father mirrors his relationship with his own, which means every instinct he has is compromised from the start.

I think I keep writing Max because I understand that feeling. Not the detective part—I’ve never chased a suspect through a warehouse or been abducted at gunpoint. But the “can’t let go” part? That I know.

Every book I write is a story I have to finish. I have to know what happens to the characters. I can’t walk away from a half-written manuscript any more than Max can walk away from a half-solved case. We’re both stubborn that way. We both lose sleep over the pieces that don’t fit. And we both keep going past the point where a reasonable person would probably stop.

Maybe that’s why Max feels real to readers. He’s not a fantasy of competence. He’s a portrait of persistence—messy, costly, sometimes misguided, but real. And his dog Russ is right there beside him, which is the most honest relationship in the whole series, because dogs don’t care about your track record. They just stay.

I’m excited about Baker Street. It’s the book that answers the question readers have been asking since Harvested: who was Max before? And I think the answer is going to surprise people—not because it’s some dramatic twist, but because it shows how much a person can change when the worst thing happens, and how much stays exactly the same.

That book arrives in May. I’ll have more to share soon—cover, first chapter, the whole thing.

In the meantime, if you haven’t met Max yet, here’s where to start:

Harvested (Max Boucher #1): https://geni.us/Harvested

Teaching Moments (Max Boucher #2): https://geni.us/Teaching_Moments

Thanks for reading. And if you’ve already read Max’s stories, I’d love to hear from you—what moment stuck with you? What do you want to see in Baker Street? I always look forward to hearing what you think.