Yvonne: Bruce Farmer, I’m so excited to be here today and to be able to talk to you about this fabulous book, Blood Sapphire’s Revenge. Wow. What a character you have in Haddy Abrams. Tell us how you created her.

Bruce: Well, Yvonne, Haddy, as the readers will appreciate, is a complex character and I needed someone from a culture that reflects her pathos and I couldn’t think of a better culture than Israel.

These are people that live with the threat of annihilation on a daily basis, and their attitude is get on with life, and they’re fighters through and through, and that’s why she’s an Israeli. And then everything else kind of follows from that. And then in Israeli society, women are part of the military.

So Haddy is birthed from . . . she’s part of that culture. But at the same time, she’s born in America, so she has that American, jewish princess, you know, privilege like, so she has to deal with two worlds.

Yvonne: Mm-hmm.

Bruce: . . . And I wanted her also born in Odessa, Ukraine because it captured my imagination. There’s something about that city that captured my imagination.

I wanted her born. New York City. Her grandfather is from South Hampton. He’s crazy wealthy. So these are the things that create this character.

At the same time. Haddy is one of those individuals who is freighted with an internal sense of existential angst. And it hit me, what would it be like to take that character and make her a Spec Ops sniper in the Israeli Defense Force?

Yvonne: So, you created this Haddy character and you know, she’s kind of born in these different places and she comes from everywhere and she’s, um, she’s really, in some ways for someone like myself, the embodiment of a strong woman who is working to change the world somehow in the, in the only way that she knows how.

Bruce: Yes.