Christmas time is here. Not so much happiness and cheer.

Bits and pieces, including some background story, and all the places where you can buy Necessary Chances, book fifteen in the Operation Quickline series. It runs about 300 pages, and sells for $15.99 in paperback and $4.99 as an ebook, available at the fine retailers below.

Synopsis for Necessary Chances

The Christmas season may be Lisa Wycherly’s favorite time of the year, but December 1989 is shaping up to be the worst ever.

First, her husband, Sid Hackbirn, gets the shock of his life when an old high school buddy turns up unexpectedly, triggering Sid’s terrifying memories of fighting in the Vietnam War. Worse yet, the encounter pushes Sid and Lisa into investigating three crooked Federal agents while trying to hide their own top-secret work from their family and Sid’s other friends.

But there’s a family problem too. Lisa’s nephew Darby may be heading for trouble thanks to his exceptional talent as a violinist. A persistent agent is courting the 16-year-old, as are any number of girls. Darby is determined to stand on his own two feet. And the rest of the family is worried that the boy is about to get himself into the kind of trouble adults can’t handle.

With Darby’s ego spinning out of control, and each attempt to capture the crooked Feds going ever more disastrously awry, Lisa’s merry little Christmas is turning into one deadly mess.

How I wrote the story

I’ll be honest. If I have only knitted one Christmas sweater, it is because in real life, I don’t knit as much as Lisa Wycherly does. Seriously, I don’t.

But I do love the holiday season. I love holiday lights and Christmas trees. I love finding just the right present for everybody on my list. And I love watching my favorite holiday specials and movies. Which is hysterical because my husband is a Grinch. And proud of it.

So when it came time to write the last Operation Quickline book, it only seemed natural to set it during the month of December. Christmas already played a significant role in two Quickline books, both of which are tied to major transitions in Sid and Lisa’s lives. The first, That Old Cloak and Dagger Routine, introduces Sid to celebrating Christmas in the first place. The other book is Just Because You’re Paranoid, book nine, which is the last book before Sid and Lisa get married, and their family circle grows.

An old plot

Then there was the plotline about Sid’s old friend coming back from the dead in Vietnam, having switched dog tags with another soldier who had been killed. I promise, I’d been toying with that idea since back in the early 1980s, when I originally wrote the bulk of the series. Fast forward almost forty years, in 2021, and the idea of finally developing that twist sprang to life. I couldn’t resist. But Sid had grown so much as a person, as had Lisa. I wasn’t sure how to make it work, let alone get past the string of coincidences that it would take. Until I remembered Dale O’Connor and his tendency to act as puppetmaster. Better yet, between this story’s first draft and the one you see here, I learned something about Dale that will be revealed later, but it made the last link in the story connect.

This is the last Operation Quickline book. We know from the prologue in That Old Cloak and Dagger Routine that the agency has been disbanded. But the good news is that this will not be the last book with Sid and Lisa. They are getting reassigned, and there will be more to read. I promise.