JD Lasica has been a journalist, startup founder, social media pioneer, and public speaker. Now he’s entered a different media frontier, becoming the author of fast-paced, high-tech action thrillers.

High-tech conspiracy-thriller author JD Lasica

A Rutgers University graduate with a B.A. in communication, JD launched his media career as a reporter for his hometown newspaper, the Passaic, N.J. Herald News. He moved on to editing jobs in California with the Sacramento Union and Sacramento Bee, then left newspapers for writing and editing positions in the tech industry. He became the first “new media” columnist for the American Journalism Review, then the chief columnist for the Online Journalism Review, and a columnist for the technology blog Engadget. 

In 2005, he published Darknet, a book about copyright wars and the future of media. That year he also started up a grassroots media community and one of the first video hosting and sharing sites on the Internet. He went on to found and lead a consulting firm providing social media services to companies, and also collaborative blogs serving nonprofits and social-change organizations. In 2012, Social Technology Review named him on its list of the “Top 100 Influencers in Social Media.”

JD has spoken at Harvard, Cambridge, Stanford, MIT, the Cannes Film Festival, and at events on four continents. He spoke at the United Nations in 2012 about how to use social media to combat global poverty.

Writing thrillers is the latest endeavor for this busy media expert, as he explains in our interview. He published his first high-tech conspiracy thriller, Biohack, in May 2018, inaugurating his “Shadow Operatives” series. It soared to #1 in five Amazon bestseller categories. In March 2019, he released the first series sequel, Catch and Kill.

NOTE: CATCH AND KILL WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR FREE ON MONDAY, MAY 20 THROUGH TUESDAY, MAY 21, 2019. Download your copy at the preceding link right away!

Your friendly neighborhood Vigilante Author was fascinated by the parallels in our backgrounds: early careers in journalism, then involvement with online media and nonprofits, with a turn to writing politically charged thriller fiction much later in life. I couldn’t wait to learn more about JD, and he happily obliged my curiosity by answering my eager questions.

Watch out for this writer, folks: He’s already making a name for himself in the thriller genre, and you’ll want to get in on the ground floor.

Here’s our conversation:

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The Vigilante Author: JD, congratulations on the successful releases of Biohack and Catch and Kill. They’re amassing exceptional sales, along with terrific reviews and stellar Amazon customer ratings. Why don’t we begin with a bit of background about your “Shadow Operatives” thrillers. What’s the inspiration for the series?

JD Lasica: I live in the tech capital of the world, Silicon Valley. Have you noticed the shift in the public’s attitude toward technological change in the past few years? The dark side of tech fascinates me, and that’s what propels my thrillers.

Biohack was about the dark side of biotech. My new book, Catch and Kill, has storylines involving virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and bioweapons. What people seem to like is that even though I tackle cutting-edge subjects, the setting and characters are firmly grounded in today — or “the next five minutes,” as one reader put it.

The Vigilante Author: Grounded in emerging, disruptive technological reality, then.

JD Lasica: I was a journalist for twenty years, so I try to follow this credo: Do your research, keep it real, ground your story with facts. I love the works of Michael Crichton and James Rollins and even include “Fact vs. Fiction” sections at the back of my novels. The truth of where tech may be taking us is scarier than any fiction I could make up from whole cloth.

The Vigilante Author: Your fact-rooted fiction seems to cross or combine a lot of thriller subgenres.

JD Lasica: Catch and Kill has elements of a conspiracy thriller, espionage thriller, crime fiction, military thriller and medical thriller. But it’s chiefly a technothriller.

It’s interesting. “Technothriller” used to mean Tom Clancy novels with big war machines: jet fighters, nuclear subs. But I think today’s technothriller relies on a different kind of threat. One that arises not from nation states but from adversaries plotting in the shadows. That’s why I titled this the “Shadow Operatives” series.

The Vigilante Author: Your thrillers feature a young heroine, which is a bit unusual for a male author. What prompted you to do make that choice, and what else is unusual about her that might distinguish her from other thriller protagonists?

JD Lasica: I didn’t want to write a thriller with the stereotypical protagonist who’s a jaded FBI agent, CIA agent, or private investigator. Kaden Baker is a young woman who was abused as a child and now finds herself thrust into an international maelstrom of intrigue involving some close family members she didn’t know she had.

I created a premise that centers on family relationships because I think that can get readers to invest emotionally in the characters. We put ourselves in these characters’ shoes and decide whether we’d make the same life choices and moral decisions that confront Kaden and her family members.

The Vigilante Author: You mentioned your journalism background. Where did it all begin for you?

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