joel barrows

Joel W. Barrows is an Iowa district court judge who regularly oversees both criminal and civil trials. Before his appointment to the bench, he practiced law for nearly twenty-three years, spending eighteen of those as a state and then federal prosecutor. Joel has been a crime fiction novelist since 2006.

​As an attorney, Joel regularly argued before the United States Court of Appeals. His cases have spanned a diverse range of offenses, including white-collar crime, environmental crime, cybercrime, child exploitation, narcotics and firearms offenses, immigration crimes, bank robbery, health care fraud, public corruption, civil rights violations, and threats against the President. Many of these cases involved high-profile prosecutions.

 He holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in history, and law degrees from both Drake and Georgetown. ​Joel has traveled extensively in Central America and resides with his family in eastern Iowa. With his Deep Cover series, he has become an Amazon Best-Selling Author in Mystery Series and Political Thrillers & Suspense. 

A.C. Frieden is a globe-trotting thriller author whose international roots—from Senegal to Switzerland to Latin America and across Asia—fuel the pulse-pounding realism of his novels. A tech lawyer by day, and formerly a molecular biologist, army sniper, seaplane pilot, and scuba instructor, Frieden brings rare authenticity to stories that weave together law, geopolitics, and espionage. He is best known for the acclaimed Jonathan Brooks series, which follows a New Orleans attorney drawn into conspiracies far beyond the courtroom.

His latest installment, Dead in the Quarter, launched at Bouchercon 2025 in New Orleans, plunges readers into a deadly plot set against the city’s gritty underbelly. Frieden has published six novels and contributed to three acclaimed thriller anthologies. From abandoned Soviet ruins to the alleys of Pyongyang and the radioactive remains of Chernobyl, his immersive research and taut prose make every scene feel dangerously real.

As one of the country’s leading tech-industry legal executives, Frieden has served as General Counsel for multinational tech companies and practiced at two global law firms. Fluent in four languages, he holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in molecular biology, a Juris Doctor, and a Master of Laws in Intellectual Property Law, with honors—and he is constantly traveling the globe, interviewing people who operate in the shadows, in search of compelling new settings, hidden histories, and high-stakes drama for his next thriller. 

Robby Henson is a filmmaker, screenwriter, theater director, playwright and arts-behind-bars instructor. He received his M.F.A. from NYU’s graduate film school and has written and directed several documentaries for PBS as well as five feature films for major studios - The Badge, Pharaoh’s Army, The Visitation, House and Thr3e.  His films have been seen at Sundance and around the world and he is a member of the Writers Guild of America. He currently teaches screenwriting at the University of Kentucky and is also Artistic Director of Pioneer Playhouse, a regional theater in central Kentucky, where he runs their outreach program Voices Inside that instructs incarcerated writers in writing and performance skills so as to fight recidivism. 

Steven Jankowski was born and raised in The Bronx, NY and spent most of his adult life hustling a living in the entertainment business. He spent the first ten years out of high school working as a stagehand in the 1970’s NYC Rock & Roll music scene, and on the road as a band roadie and road manager.  In the mid-8o’s he returned to school to study film at Hunter College, and then moved to Los Angeles to earn his MFA in Screenwriting at USC. Since then Steve has written or co-written over 30 screenplays with nine of them having been produced.

In the spring of 1999, Steve took a sabbatical from work to sail a 42-foot boat from Los Angeles to Tahiti with 3 other people. Steve continues to write for the screen and sails his 34-foot Catalina sailboat whenever he can.

BELOW THE LINE marks Steven’s first foray into fiction writing and draws from his many years of experience in the film and music industries, as well as his love of sailing. Steven currently resides in the Los Angeles port city of San Pedro, CA.

Nolan Knight is the author of The Gorgon of Los Feliz, Gallows Dome, The Neon Lights Are Veins, and Beneath the Black Palms. He is a fourth generation Angeleno and former staff writer for Los Angeles’ Biggest Music Publication, the L.A. Record. His short fiction has been featured in various publications including Akashic Books, Thuglit, Shotgun Honey, Starlite Pulp, and Action, Spectacle. His work has been met with praise by luminaries such as Barry Gifford, James Sallis, Allison Anders, and Lydia Lunch. He lives in Long Beach. Publishers Weekly calls Knight’s prose “a perfect fit for characters whose dreams die slowly or explosively,” while Kirkus Reviews hails his writing as “unapologetically confrontational, grimly poignant—a gritty depiction of L.A. vice and vicissitude.”