Ember Clarke is the assassin you think you’d like to grab a beer with, but then you can’t help wonder if she might’ve slipped something in your Guinness when you weren’t looking. There’s a lot about her I can’t say without spoiling huge chunks of the Six Assassins series, but let’s delve a little deeper in our favorite contract killer…
WHO
Very little is known about November Clarke prior to her joining the entity (later revealed as) the DAC. During her three-year tenure as a member of the Denver Assassins Club, she has also been a member of the Boulder Branch, one of the six Branches of the Club. Whatever she was doing and where she was doing it prior to that time is lost information…
WHAT
Given her appearance, you might think Ember Clarke was a goth kid in high school. Pale skin and long black hair contrast sharply with her blue eyes. She’s trained in multiple forms of hand-to-hand combat, including kickboxing and BJJ. Also, she has years of training with close-range and long-range weapons. She prefers a Microtech Halo knife and her twin Nighthawk Custom Enforcer pistols, though. Familiarity breeds comfort.
Across the Six Assassins series, she develops a relationship with Zach Bennett, younger brother of Nick Thacker’s Harvey Bennett character.
WHEN
Ember Clarke makes her first appearance in the Harvey Bennett prequel thriller The Lethal Bones, when she seeks Ben to ask for his assistance achieving a goal against a rival. Can’t say much more than that! You don’t have to read The Lethal Bones in order to start the Six Assassins series, but it can’t hurt, either :)
WHERE
Ember Clarke lives in a small condo in Boulder, Colorado, at the beginning of Six Assassins. Unbeknownst to her, her neighbor down the hall is none other than Layne Parrish, and he’s not there by accident…
Serena Rojas also makes several appearances in the Six Assassins series.
And finally, characters related to the Harvey Bennett series entity named Draconis make an appearance across that series, too. In some ways, Six Assassins can function as a direct prequel to Nick Thacker’s thriller The Enigma Strain.
WHY
November Clarke is the first character I created with someone else, at least in fiction. I had worked with a couple other authors before, and had even written for Nick’s characters. But Ember was a creation of both my pen and Nick Thacker’s. We labored for a year (in between other projects) to bring the six books of her first series to life, so we could “rapid release” all six over three months.
We knew that once you started the series, you wouldn’t want to stop, and we needed to get them out quickly! A few gray hairs aside, we pulled it off :)
