For one thing, there’s the element of patriotism.  It’s different than some of the patriotism you may have heard of, because I don’t believe in jingoism.  I don’t believe in loving your country simply because you happen to be standing on the ground beneath your feet.  I lived overseas for seven years.  I lived in England which is a wonderful, free country, and when I came back I had been transformed into a patriot.  And the reason had to do with this idea of liberty—individual liberty. 

Liberty so informs, I think, the biblical worldview that it’s almost never mentioned.  It’s just assumed.  It comes up in moments when the Hebrews come to Samuel and ask for a king, and it’s almost a tragic moment in the Old Testament because they’re leaving behind the world in which each man is simply governed by God.  And in America we’ve kind of come back to that idea that each man can be governed by God.  And it’s so important because only in liberty can you find the things that matter.  You can’t be forced to have faith.  You can’t be forced to love your neighbor.  You can’t be forced to love God.  Those are things you have to choose, and they have no meaning unless you choose them.  And so Charlie’s patriotism, which is very deep, is a patriotism for liberty.  It’s a love of liberty.  And that’s one theme that’s really important.  The people who he fights and who are after him have a range of philosophies, but all of them negate liberty.  And so that is what Charlie’s looking for and what he’s trying to recover—not just his own liberty, but the ideas that lead him to liberty; they’re constantly being challenged. 

And the other one again is that when everything you’ve been told is stripped away, how do you know what you believe?  How do you know your faith is right?  How do you know which way the light is?  And that’s the kind of things that Charlie is looking for.

Will we see more of Charlie and his exploration of these themes in the future and do you envision more books in The Homelanders series?

We started out with a plan of four, but I’m starting to think it’s going to go a little longer than that.  It won’t go on forever.  I kind of don’t like these series that go on for 60 books.  So I’m thinking that five will be about the right number. 

Can you give us a sneak peek of book two?

Yes.  In book two, Charlie returns home, because he’s looking for information to prove his innocence.  So he finds that he’s going back into the place he misses most and a place that he can’t really recover right away.  And so it’s a poignant story.

Since you’ve adapted some of your other novels for the big screen, are there any plans to adapt The Last Thing I Remember as well?