----- From a New York Press interview with Chesbro, March 2001 -----

The Keeper has a strong heroine---ex-Navy, Palestinian-American in naval intelligence---who gets into difficulty during the Persian Gulf War and she's forced out. She becomes a river-keeper on the Hudson, who monitors pollution and so forth. But she has lots of secrets, classified information, and the deal was made with the Navy that she could never talk about it, either why she was discharged or anything she knows. Something occurs on the Hudson, where a fisherman dredges up something which she immediately recognizes as an obsolete weapon. It's a fish-bomb, a bomb strapped to a sea lion, and the question is, What is this thing doing in the Hudson, dead? She knows what it is but she can't say anything---she can't even disarm it, she can't give any indication she knows anything about it and tells the fisherman to call the Coast Guard. So she begins to uncover a conspiracy to sell certain types of weapons, and has many enemies who are out to kill her, and she ends up increasingly isolated because the old-boy network in the Navy won't help her.