Author Interview – Lawrence Hoffman

The Devil’s Snow centers around a battered detective and former NYPD cop and his new partner as they are drawn into a case that turns Tampa into a pressure cooker of grief and violence. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story.

The inspiration for The Devil’s Snow comes directly from the asphalt. I’m a retired NYPD detective with over 20 years of service, having worked some of the city’s most crime-ridden sectors during the volatile decades of the 1980s and 1990s. Alex Archer is loosely based on my own trajectory from a uniform officer to a detective. When you spend two decades seeing the absolute worst—and occasionally the best—of humanity, those experiences don’t just leave you; they shape how you view the world. Dropping a character with that heavy New York baggage into a pressure cooker like Tampa allowed me to explore how a seasoned cop handles a completely different brand of chaos.

Archer often uses humor and sarcasm in dark situations. Why was that an important part of his character?

For a street cop or a detective, sarcasm isn’t just a personality trait—it’s a survival mechanism. When you’re constantly walking into crime scenes, dealing with violence, and seeing the rawest parts of human tragedy, you can’t carry that weight around with a straight face 24/7. Your mind would snap. Gallows humor is the armor cops wear to keep the darkness at bay; it’s a way to process the unprocessable with your peers so you can get back to the job. I wanted Alex Archer to have that exact defense mechanism because without it, he wouldn’t feel like a real cop. It grounds his humanity and gives him a shield to hide behind when the job gets personal.

How did you approach writing about the long-term effects of September 11th? Do you see Alex Archer returning in future stories? 

Absolutely. Alex Archer will be back in a sequel titled ‘Vanished Twin.’ It’s a psychological crime thriller that pushes Archer and his team into much darker, more twisted territory. They find themselves tracking a series of ritualistic murders tied to occult symbolism and a suspect suffering from severe dissociative illness. As they dig deeper, they discover the suspect believes he is controlled by a twin who vanished before birth. The investigation uncovers a history of abuse, cult manipulation, and fractured identity, leading to a shocking revelation: the twin might not be a delusion at all, but an equally dangerous presence hiding in plain sight. It’s going to force Archer to question everything he thinks he knows about a crime scene.

Writing about September 11th isn’t just a plot point for me; it’s deeply personal. As an NYPD officer during that era, I lived through the immediate devastation and the heavy, lingering shadow it cast over the city and the department for years afterward. In the book, I wanted to move past the immediate headlines and look at the slow-burning, long-term psychological toll. Cops are expected to be unbreakable, but events of that magnitude reshape your DNA. By filtering that trauma through Alex Archer, I wanted to show the quiet, exhausting burden of carrying that history with you, even when you try to leave the city behind.