He brought the ax down in a steady hard swing. The ax severed the man’s hand at the wrist.
SPOILER. I had resisted doing a series for the longest time. All my earlier thrillers were stand-alone stories. I had a problem with series where one character appears in book after book. I call it the "Jessica Fletcher Syndrome," named after the main character of Murder She Wrote. Here was a woman from Cabot Cove who was always stumbling over a dead body. You must eventually wonder "What's wrong with that woman?" Also it's hard to maintain jeopardy with a series' character. For example, if someone holds a gun against Jessica Fletcher's head, you know the trigger will never be pulled because she's in next week's episode. I finally agreed to write a series based on Sigma due to the fact that it was based on a "group" of people (versus one individual). So I could freely kill and maim major members of Sigma universe because the unit could always recruit someone new to take their place. In other words, no one is safe in the Sigma. And with this first main book, I wanted to make that clear. That ax did fall and someone important lost a hand.
