“Ghost Drop,” the first book in Kevin Higgins’s near-future military techno-thriller series, is now available for Kindle! (Trade edition paperback, coming within the week.)
In the pre-dawn dark along the Texas border, gunfire erupts as thermal-masked convoys slip across the river behind armed drones and military-grade jammers, leaving a young Border Patrol agent bleeding in the dirt. She’s the first casualty of a war most Americans won’t know is underway until it’s too late.
Yahya al-Ghazali, the mastermind behind the incursion, doesn’t seek victory on any battlefield. He wants panic and chaos metastasizing through the heart of the enemy he blames for everything he’s lost. His weapons are Iranian-backed sleeper cells, buried for years inside American communities, now waking up.
Against him stands Army veteran Sam Knightsbridge and PHANTOM Force: a rapid-response unit forged from the hard lessons of Ukraine and two decades of Middle East combat. Their edge—teleoperated combat robots, delivered by drop pod at 700 mph, hitting faster and fighting smarter than any conventional force can.
But the enemy hides among the very people Sam is sworn to protect, and lethal machines make brutal mistakes. Counterinsurgency on home soil is fraught, and the scars it leaves run deeper than any wound.
Ghost Drop is the explosive first installment in the DropHawk Thrillers, Kevin Higgins’s near-future military techno-thriller series delivering relentless action, plausible tech, and flawed heroes fighting a desperate war. If you crave gritty, hard-edged military fiction ripped from tomorrow’s battlefields, start here.
The war escalates in Book 2, Terror Swarm (August 2026), and detonates in Book 3, Phantom War (Fall 2026).
Bio: I grew up a Navy brat, then enlisted in the U.S. Army Infantry at age 21. I entered as a private, earned selection for and admission into Officer Candidate School, then spent the rest of the time wearing bars. After several years training force-on-force unit combat in the Mojave with the Army's elite mechanized OPFOR, and then the joy of command while at Fort Carson, CO, which included the challenges and rewards of taking a company of soldiers to Saudi Arabia and bringing them all home safely, I left the military in search of new experiences.
Like many who leave the military, I hit some hiccups trying to figure out how to communicate to civilians that a decade of training soldiers to aggressively close with and kill the enemy was an experience that would translate swimmingly into their company culture. Eventually I overcame that communication challenge. That led to several years doing the "corporate thing," pursuing a career that led from retail to IT, following my passions for computers and communications developed as a(n) (unlikely) hobby while a soldier.
In the late nineties, I had the good fortune to hire into one of the pioneer companies in the (then new) massively multiplayer online game industry. While there I saw opportunity to start my own company and used all my experiences (and no small amount of learning new skills on the fly!) to build an online payment processing company.
My first company, PayByCash, brought local non-credit-card payment methods from around the world to Internet content providers with one very simple integration. After growing for 8 years and earning the trust of the largest game content providers in the world (and most of the smaller ones as well), we merged with a VC-funded Silicon Valley company and were later acquired by Visa.
In my on-again-off-again "retirement," as a serial entrepreneur, I develop (and occasionally launch) new ventures. When not torturing myself with the responsibility to nurse my whackadoodle ideas into profitability, I spend the time with my family that I rarely had when running my first (and to date most successful) company.
And I write, sporadically and spasmodically. When not writing, I race cars and enjoy improving my skills in the shooting sports.
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