Warning: Thar be Spoilers Ahead!
In these notes, I discuss the content of the book and give additional information about it. These are intended to be read after you've read the book, or at least after you've read each Chapter. Otherwise, you're likely to learn information about what happens in the book that may spoil your enjoyment while reading it for the first time.
You have been warned!
Historian's Introduction
Sorry I couldn't think of a fancier name than the "Big Split". It sounds like something that might take hold in popular vernacler, doesn't it? The book itself isn't really about the Big Split, but I wanted you (the reader) to understand the context of the settings without belaboring it. Certainly the name is descriptive.
The events leading up to and during the Big Split will be illustrated further in the prequal short stories and possibly a future novel series. Hitchhiking Killer for Hire is the first of those short stories, covering how Sam Harper was led to start Sharper Security.
I'm sure someone else has done a book introduction as a future historian looking back on the (currently still future) events of the book, but I can't think of one off-hand.
Hopefully it's clear from the introduction that Sharper Security is just book one in a series that will explore the Sovereign Security Company concept and how they may interrelate with each other governments styles they have to coexist with.
Prologue
The prologue is set "In The Near Future" so that it doesn't immediately become dated as time goes on.
I'm into this series for the long haul. It may only have enough readership for a trilogy related to La Raza Council, but ideally, it could go on for lots of books. I presently have only the first two trilogies mapped out, with the first three books dealing with Sharper Security and La Raza Council and the next trilogy tentatively planned for Sam Harper to go overseas and visit Great Britain (Hamish!), China and France. Obviously, that's all subject to change, but that's the current plan.
It's a loose series, so each book's plot needs to stand on it's own, however there will be plot arcs that tie each trilogy together as well as characters and events from "past" books that will influence later books. Book two will have most of the same characters, but it won't be about Edmond and Evie as the plot focus.
The prologue started as a small cottage in my mind, but there just wasn't a good location within Paris that fit the characters and the plot. Thus, it was changed to an apartment, which is much more common in paris.
You can look around the street here, the apartments tend to be on the upper floors.
You can see that a surveillance van could easily fit in with the normal traffic, but that there would be a lot of innocent bystanders to clear out if you were planning to blow something up.
Inter-agency cooperation between Britain and France is currently not as common as depicted in the book, but I'm taking the liberty of assuming that sometime a politician is going to put together an ill-advised program of this sort to encourage them to get along better.
