Publication Day: Exposed King

Today is publication day for Exposed King.

This novel has been a long time coming. What began as a crime thriller about a city under pressure evolved into a story that feels uncomfortably close to the world we’re living in now—where trust is fragile, power is protected, and justice is anything but simple.

Exposed King follows NYPD Commissioner James Maguire as New York City spirals. Criminals are turning up dead, fear is spreading, and someone is sending a message that the system can no longer ignore. As the lines between right and wrong blur, Maguire is forced to confront a question with no easy answer:
What happens when justice stops working?

The book is now live on Amazon Kindle, and I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who’s supported the James Maguire series along the way.

Thank you for reading.
The story is officially yours.

Pick up your copy of Expose King on Amazon today.

— Andrew G. Nelson

Cover Reveal: EXPOSED KING

Today, I’m excited to officially reveal the cover for Exposed King, the next James Maguire novel.

I didn’t set out to write a book that mirrored the moment we’re living in—but sometimes fiction gets there first. Exposed King explores what happens when justice fractures, trust collapses, and a city is pushed to the edge. Today, I’m revealing the cover.

From the beginning, this story has been about pressure—on a city, on the justice system, and on the people sworn to uphold it. The cover reflects that tension: a city on edge, authority under siege, and a single figure standing at the center of it all.

Exposed King asks a simple but uncomfortable question: What happens when the system stops working—and people decide to take justice into their own hands?

This book was written before many of the events we’re witnessing now, but like the best crime fiction, it explores forces that never really go away: power, anger, corruption, and the consequences of pushing society too far.

The story is coming soon.
And so is the reckoning.

September 11th, Charlie Kirk, and Exposed King

I am sitting here this morning feeling a sense of numbness as I deal with the normal emotions of September 11th coupled with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I say ‘normal’ because as an NYPD first responder on that day I have grudgingly accepted that the emotions are part of who I am now. I stopped trying to make sense of it long ago, and now I just accept that there is an ebb and flow that I must ride out annually. I don’t fight it; I just let the memories come in and go out, because you cannot make ‘sense’ of what happened twenty-four years ago.

On September 11th, 2001, we came together as a country. At first we felt rage and anger about the terrorist attack. Then we felt the collective pain as we came to terms with the fact that we’d lost thousands of our fellow citizens; men, women and children who would never see another sunrise; people who woke up and died because of someone else’s hatred. Then there was a brief moment of solidarity: United We Stand, Never Forget, Remember the Heroes… but like most altruistic slogans, it had no depth.

Yesterday, September 10th, 2025, a 31-year-old husband and father of two small children was assassinated in Utah. His crime? Having a dissenting opinion.

Charlie Kirk was on a university campus, a world where dissenting opinions have traditionally been fostered and embraced, but yesterday we were told, in no uncertain terms, that this world no longer exists.

A man was murdered in cold-blood and many cheered at his demise.

A bullet became the ultimate form of censorship.

It reminded me of the line spoken by Tyrion Lannister in George R.R. Martin’s book: Clash of Kings – “When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”

This is America now. This is who we have become. Not United, but divided to the point that murder has become an acceptable course of action against those whom we disagree with.

I released my last James Maguire book, Glass Castle, in 2019. As most good authors, I had the working plot for the next book, Exposed King, in my head. I remember that I struggled a bit with it, because it had what I felt was a radical leap, or, to use the old Happy Days trope, I felt like I was ‘jumping the shark’ with this story-line, but I told myself that I could polish it and make it plausible. I’d moved on to the next Alex Taylor book, The Killing Game, as I compiled notes and ideas and fleshed-out the outline.

Then Covid-19 happened.

I thought it was my time to shine, to get the downtime I needed to write my little heart out.

I finished The Killing Game, I wrote Awakening, a genre bending police procedural meets vampires, got in another Cold Case novella, and even managed to write: Shadow Strike, a Maguire origin story, but Exposed King languished in a file on my computer.

I wrote some chapters, which were more like snippets or frustrated paragraphs, in fits and starts, struggling as I went, as if some unseen force was trying to block me. As a writer, I knew I had to walk away. Forcing it would never work. I kept asking myself why I was having so much of a problem.

It’s fiction. I’m a writer. This is what I do.

The truth is I fear that Exposed King won’t be fiction. The premise is less of a ‘who done it’ and more of a ‘what if.’

As I said earlier, the plot came to me during Glass Castle, pre-dating Covid, but also George Floyd and before the Defund the Police movement and all the other radical events since. With each passing day, I saw my fictional plot growing potentially more real, and it scared me.

America is changing, and not for the better.

For nearly a hundred years, Superman’s iconic motto was: “Truth, Justice, and the American Way,” and yet today we find ourselves facing an America where truth is subjective, justice is no longer impartial, and the American way is abhorrent to a large swath of society.

I know I have to finish Exposed King; I just hope it remains within the realm of fictional work and does not become a prescient warning.

A part of me wonders if George Orwell felt the same way when he published 1984.

May God have mercy on us.

9/11 World Trade Center Cross taken by anne bybee

Alex Taylor - Book 4 Update

Well, happy spring everyone. The birds are chirping; the grass is turning green, weather is utterly bi-polar, and yours truly is camped out behind his desk, putting the finishing work on the latest Alex Taylor novel.

It feels like forever since I published a new book and, truth be told, it isn’t that far off. The last book I released was The Crazy Eight Cowboys novella in January 2021. I regret the delay, but 2021 was a year of challenges for us. What started out as a simple house flip grew into a monster and consumed almost the entire year for us. Thankfully, we could sell the home in December, so we have closed that chapter of our life.

Since then, I have been back at work writing and I can happily report that I have finished the first draft of the latest Alex Taylor novel (title TBD) and it is presently in editing. Barring any unforeseen events, I should be able to release it this April.

I know many of you are waiting on the next James Maguire novel, as well as the follow-up book in the Crystal Coven series. All I can say is, please be patient with me; they are coming.

Awakening: The Crystal Coven Saga (Pre-Order)

I’m pleased to announce that my latest book, Awakening: The Crystal Coven Saga, is available for PRE-ORDER on Amazon and will be officially released on July 31st.

This is a story I have been working on for a while now and I am so happy to finally release it. Up until now, the majority of my fiction books have fit into the traditional police procedural genre and this one will as well, with one exception. Awakening crosses over from the mortal realm to the supernatural and introduces a new protagonist, NYPD Detective Karl Sigurdsson.

When the body of an elderly man is discovered in a local park the unsettling clues point to something much more nefarious than the street-wise detective is accustomed to handling. Soon, he begins to see an unsettling pattern begin to emerge, but is the killer homicidal maniac or something even more terrifying?

Sigurdsson soon realizes that the criminal justice system is the least of his concerns, as he is drawn deeper into the labyrinthian world of vampires. As a power struggle brewing in the immortal world threatens to boil over into the mortal realm, Sigurdsson is forced to confront the fact that he could soon turn from being the hunter into the hunted.

The origins of this novel reside in a song called ‘Make me Wanna Die,"‘ by The Pretty Reckless. I’d heard it one day while I was at the gym and I thought it was an interesting premise, especially if you put it within the supernatural realm. It turned into the premise for Awakening: How far would you go to save the woman you love?

Karl Sigurdsson is about to find out.

You can pre-order the e-book now and it will be delivered to your Kindle on July 31st. The print copy will also be available on that day as well.

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