The Directive Series
The Characters
The Wardenclyffe Directive
The Investigators
Protagonist
Aimee Mercer
Investigative Journalist · Pulitzer Prize, 2021
Aimee Mercer is the best defense budget journalist in the country, which is a specialty so narrow that most people have never heard of it. She won her Pulitzer for a series on procurement fraud that sent three contractors to prison and closed a program that had been running for eleven years. She is forty-one years old, works out of a sublet in Savannah, and does not own a television. She follows money. She has always followed money. The Wardenclyffe budget line is the strangest thing she has ever found — because the money is real, the station exists, and no one who should know about it does.
| Expertise | Defense procurement, budget forensics, source cultivation, FOIA litigation |
| Method | Follow the money. Always the money. Everything else is interpretation. |
| Setting | Savannah, Georgia · 2019 · Senate hearing rooms, Antarctic ice shelf, rural Alaska |
| Weakness | She knows when she’s being managed. She doesn’t always know why. |
| Arc | Four books. She gets the story completely right about everything except what matters most. |
More characters will be revealed as the series develops.