Interview
The following information was pulled from an interview Gregg gave about Last Shot.
Last Shot opens with an “impossible” prison break from one of California’s most notorious pens, Terminal Island (which housed inmates from Capone to Manson). So my first stop was a trip down to the prison with a deputy marshal buddy to take a look at the security positions, the fence lines, and the perimeters. It’s a pretty sturdy prison and I have to hand it to Walker Jameson, the book’s antagonist, for busting out of there, leaving behind a perfectly intact empty cell.
Last Shot presents Tim Rackley’s most formidable challenge yet. As a former Ranger and current deputy marshal, Tim is a man of action, well trained in Spec Ops warfare. But Walker is a former Recon Marine, with more recent and (dare we say?) better training. For the first time in his career, Tim is up against someone more fearsome and capable than he is. And Walker doesn’t hesitate to bring Spec Ops warfare (a brand we usually only see in the third world) to the city of Los Angeles—and to the corporations he believes have done his family wrong. I tapped some of my usual suspects to help me flesh out Walker’s approach—Navy SEAL demolition breachers and snipers. It’s a cat-and-cat name when Tim and Walker square off, and the life of Walker’s nephew, an eight-year-old boy, just might hand in the balance.
The quiet hero of the novel is Walker’s sister, Tess, who did her best to get her son the treatment he needed for a genetic disorder. When she failed, she ostensibly killed herself, but Walker doesn’t buy her suicide.
Walker quickly gets himself onto the trail of a biopharmaceutical company that he holds responsible for his Tess’s death. I did a great deal of research about big pharma and the laws governing how they test and market new meds, and was appalled by what I discovered. Big pharma has managed to write into law business practices that would be illegal in any other sector (they have the biggest lobby group in Washington, more lobbyists than there are members of Congress). For instance, for a drug to get patent approval, it doesn’t have to be shown to be more effective than the existing drugs on the market—it just has to be shown more effective than a placebo. So if it beats a sugar pill in a test, even if it’s a worse drug than those already in existence to treat the same condition, it will get approved and put behind pharmacy counters. Also, many tests that compare drugs don’t specify that the rival drugs have to be administered properly. So when comparing its pill to a rival pill, a company can give its pill orally, and mash up the rival pill and apply it topically, then claim that their pill is more effective. I familiarized myself with the laws and regulations surrounding this business, reading studies, interviewing doctors, members of NIH and the FDA, and digging behind the headlines of the myriad recent pharma scandals. I created my own big pharma company—Beacon Kagan—so I could take readers behind the scenes, into the boardrooms, and show them the tenor of this brand of corporate dialogue.
Another field that quickly drew my interest was viral vectors. To cure certain genetic disorders, medical scientists are trying an amazing new approach. They take a live virus, pull out the viral load (in essence, turning the virus into a transport vehicle), and drop in a therapeutic gene. Once injected into a patient, this “viral vector” inserts the therapeutic gene into the patient’s genome, curing the genetic disorder. While this field is still in its infancy, the prospects are staggering. Walker’s nephew was a subject eligible for such a cure, but the company pulled him from their study. Once he breaks out of prison, Walker wants to know why his nephew was dropped, and he’s willing to twist some arms and rattle some cages to find out.
