Taylor Moore, author of Down Range and Firestorm, is bringing his just-released third book in the popular Garrett Kohl series with him to Canadian this week for an autograph party at the Stumblin’ Goat Saloon.

Moore will be at The Goat from 5-7 pm on Friday, Sept. 1, for the release of his new book, Ricochet. Copies will be available for purchase and for autographs.

RICOCHET: A Garrett Kohl Novel

By Taylor Moore

Release Date: August 29, 2023 / William Morrow

Hardcover: $30.00

IN A RECENT INTERVIEW with The Record, Moore talked about the release of his third Garrett Kohl novel—which coincides with the delivery of the series’ fourth book to his editors—amid the frantic pace of interviews, podcasts, book signings, and more deadlines ahead.

“My world is just ramping up,” Moore said. “This is like my tax season for accountants, because I’ve got Book Four due the beginning of September, and Book Three just coming out.”

Kohl doesn’t seem to mind, though. The sixth-generation Texan is a former CIA Intelligence Officer, who worked in both analysis and operations and later consulted for the Department of Defense in the fields of theater security cooperation, force protection and counter-narcotics. A little action and adventure is nothing new.

And, in fact, it’s nothing new to DEA agent Garrett Kohl, whose life as a global warrior battling foreign operatives comes in direct conflict with his desire to settle down back on the family ranch in the Texas Panhandle.

The just-released Ricochet features many of the now-familiar characters we met in the first two books. Whether they are villains or victims, scoundrels or saints, we become better acquainted with each reading, as their more complex personal histories are revealed.

Ricochet begins with Special Agent Kohl returning home, hoping to establish a normal life. He is learning the ropes of fatherhood with his adopted son Asadi, falling deeper in love with his high school crush Lacey, and rebuilding his wildfire-ravaged cattle camp. That brief brush with relative domesticity is interrupted when an engineer working at the nearby nuclear weapons plant asks for his help. Kohl is drawn into a clandestine investigation of Iranian operatives who are blackmailing employees at the facility, with plans for sabotage and destruction.

When enemy commandos hijack a train carrying nuclear weapons, and activate assassination plans against the U.S. Defense Secretary, Kohl seeks the help of a group of outlaws and outcasts who—despite their differences—close ranks to defend their homes and families and way of life.

MOORE'S BOOKS ARE RICH with carefully observed detail, obviously gleaned from his own career with the CIA, and with the extensive research he does when writing.

Asked how he made the leap from cattle ranching to military intelligence, Moore admitted, “It wasn’t a natural progression, but I had traveled pretty extensively overseas beforehand.”

Moore’s travels included backpacking through South America, trekking from the jungles of South America, to Antarctica on a Russian research vessel, and throughout Europe. While attending graduate school at Pepperdine, with studies in economics and international relations, Moore took an internship at the U.S. mission to the European Union in Brussels, Belgium.

Those experiences, along with what Moore described as his “sort of wild, adventurous spirit,” and the ability to write and be good at public speaking, proved the perfect skill set and background for the CIA.

While that work has obviously informed Moore’s writing, he admits his career with the CIA wasn’t nearly as dangerous as Kohl’s.

Sometimes, it’s not so much what you know, but who you know, though. One friend Moore mentioned was a former Green Beret who worked in the agency’s paramilitary branch.

“He would talk about some of the things they did,” he said. “Although I didn’t do them personally, I had friends at the agency that did do those things, so it lent itself to…an understanding of the world, and who these people are that do the kind of work they do that’s extremely dangerous.”

After a decade with the CIA and military intelligence, Moore returned to Texas. “I kind of had to reinvent myself,” he said. “I grew up on a farm and ranch down in Central Texas. I had grown up on the other end of the table from the oil and gas business, and met plenty of land men. I thought I’d try my hand at that.”

With a boom underway in the Panhandle, Moore hired on to do contract work. “I was what they’d call a surface land man,” he said. “I was going up there, making deals with landowners and ranchers and farmers from Perryton and Canadian and Miami. I just really fell in love with the area.”

“As a person who loves history—particularly Texas history—my imagination would roam wild when I was up there on those ranches,” Moore said, adding that his all-time favorite book is Lonesome Dove. “I could just see the Texas Rangers and the Comanches. I could just see everything playing out, right before me.”

One of the first wells Moore drilled was on Hank the Cowdog author John Erickson’s land. “I had written a book before, but hadn’t done anything with it,” Moore said. “John was the one that really encouraged me to start writing again.”

Denizens of the Texas Panhandle will take particular interest in the author’s frequent references to this area, which Moore now calls home, and its residents. Some, like Canadian’s Stumblin’ Goat and the Oasis Truck Stop, and the Pantex Plant outside of Amarillo, are easily identifiable. Others may be less so—more an amalgam of different characters and places—which lend themselves to the reader’s speculation.

“I would say that everybody in the book is a combination of several people, from the CIA all the way down to the people that are from Canadian. Nobody is really one person…but may be four or five different people, molded into one character.”

“My one rule of thumb,” he added, “is that if something bad happens, I’ll use a fake name. If something good happens, I use the real name.”

GOOD OR BAD, THERE'S NO DENYING Moore’s connection to and fondness for the place and its people. Developing that emotional attachment, he said, proved to be a key to his books’ successes. The author had chosen a different protagonist for his first book, with Kohl merely a side character.

“My agent was the one who said, ‘That Garrett Kohl guy…that’s your protagonist right there,’” Moore said. “I told him absolutely not.”

The agent told Moore to think about it—and that night, he couldn’t sleep. He woke up at three or four o’clock the next morning, said, “Okay, I’m gonna’ try this.”

The first scene he wrote in the Garrett Kohl series was in Down Range, when Kohl comes back to the ranch and sees his dad again. “There was nothing thriller about it,” Moore said. “No guns or bullets or anything. It was just about a son estranged from his father, and him trying to come home and see if they can reignite their relationship.”

“It was the most fluid, natural scene I’ve ever written in my life,” he said, “and I realized, I can do this.”

That is when Moore realized that his book had to be more than a thriller.  “It’s going to be about the families, about the real people, about the land and the ranch, and how do you keep these things going,” he said.

Moore said he began to understand the struggles of landowners who own the land, but don’t own the minerals, and are just trying to keep the ranch going on cattle. “It was difficult, because we have all these droughts, all these harsh things that happen to the land,” he said, “and I wanted to focus on those people and just get into their world. That gave me the opportunity to have Kohl come back and try to get things going with his dad again…so that was how that story was born.”

Moore said the story found a life of its own in that moment. “I’m about to turn in Book Four, and outlines for Book Five and Six,” he said. “I keep having these ideas, and things keep coming up, and the characters grow…and there’s so many storylines that just keep going.”

“It’s way more than a Western then,” Moore realized. “It’s a thriller. It has the excitement and the adventure. It’s about life, love and loss, and what you could have if you just do things a certain way.”

REVIEWS FOR RICOCHET

Moore’s latest in the Kohl series has earned high praise from a legion of other writers more than familiar with the genre in which he works:

In typical form, Ricochet is an “adrenaline-fueled nail biter,” wrote J. Todd Scott, author of The Far Empty, who described Moore’s latest as “muscular, but heartfelt.”

New York Times best-selling author Nelson DeMille praised Ricochet’s “Great writing, perfect plotting, quick pacing, and a high cast of high-octane characters that brings it all together, especially Garrett Kohl who we’ll want to see again.”

Nick Petrie, author of The Runaway, called Moore’s book “A thrilling tale of family and global brinksmanship set on the high plains of West Texas … Ricochet starts like wildfire and picks up speed with every page you turn.”

Texas Monthly described Ricochet as “A rough neo-Western about family lost and found … A powerful entry in the reluctant warrior subgenre.”