Back to The Courier

Introduction and thoughts about the novel

“The Courier” is my fifth book, which I began after more than a year of taking a break from writing. The story of Maria Elena Rodriguez-Torres had its origins in a Poser picture series I did shortly after finishing “The Pledge Mistress” during the summer of 2007. I was thinking of expanding the captions of that series into a novel, but at that time I was left mentally exhausted after finishing my previous novel “The Pledge Mistress”. The story was further delayed by several important changes in my personal life, which distracted my attention from writing another novel. I feel that delay was fortunate, however, because it allowed me to start fresh with a new project without the mental exhaustion that I felt after finishing “The Pledge Mistress”.

“The Courier” introduces a new main character, 19-year-old Maria Elena Rodriguez-Torres. Unlike my previous characters, who are all either from the US or my fictional country of Danubia, Maria Elena comes from another country that exists in real life, Colombia. Lured by the promise of quick money and an escape out of her unpleasant life in South America, Maria Elena becomes a courier for a cocaine trafficking group. The story begins with her swallowing a kilogram of cocaine, with the expectation that she can take it to Europe, expel it, and turn it over to her trafficking group. With the money she expects to be paid, she hopes to start a new life in Spain. Her plans go horribly awry when her flight is diverted to Danubia and she ends up as a prisoner in the hands of the Danubian government.

In spite of the fact that “The Courier” takes place in an imaginary country, I tried to keep the details surrounding Maria Elena’s cocaine smuggling effort as realistic as possible. As incredible as it may sound to someone unfamiliar with drug smuggling, large numbers of travelers, especially women, do indeed transport drugs such as cocaine and heroin by swallowing small wrapped plastic packages called “pellets”, or “balloons”. Typically the amount transported by a drug swallower is around one kilogram, which is divided up into 50-100 pellets. The purpose of swallowing drugs is to prevent detection at airports by ion scanners and drug-sniffing dogs. This practice can be extremely dangerous, because a pellet can break in the courier’s stomach, causing an immediate overdose, or the pellets can become blocked in the intestinal tract and require surgery for removal.

The fact that Maria Elena is from Colombia is not really a reflection on that particular country, because drug couriers come from every country in the world, including the US and Europe. I figured that Colombia was as good a country as any for my character’s place of birth, but for the purposes of my novel Maria Elena could have been from any country in Latin America. My purpose in creating a character who spoke only Spanish was to allow me, as a writer, to view Danubia and the characters from my previous novels from a different perspective.

While “The Courier” focuses on a new main character, it also continues the life stories of several other characters from previous novels, most notably, Spokeswoman Kimberly Lee-Dolkivna, Criminal Adjunct Tiffany Walker-Dukovna, Cecilia Sanchez, Jason Schmidt, and the family of Danubian Prime Minister Vladim Dukov. Readers of my previous novels will notice that many of the characters have changed and behave somewhat differently than they did in the past. The reason for that is very simple: five years have gone by and characters who were introduced as university students now have careers and marriages, so of course they will act somewhat differently. Each of my characters has a life story that, in my imagination, extends beyond the confines of any particular novel. An important reason I chose to write “The Courier” was to relate more of that ongoing life story for several of my characters. The story also will allow readers of my previous novels to re-visit Danubia, which under the government of Vladim Dukov is rapidly changing. I also will explore some areas of Danubia and aspects of its society that I was not able to develop in previous works.

Chapter 1