Mobile author and playwright Thomas Lakeman has released “Broken Wing,” the third installment in his series of FBI thrillers following special agents Mike Yeager and Peggy Weaver, set in post-Katrina New Orleans. In the new book, Yeager, a profiler with a checkered past, goes undercover with a New Orleans mobster while confronting unresolved history of his own.
Lakeman was born and raised in Mobile and graduated from Murphy High School before attending Sewanee: The University of the South. He went on to study theater in England and Ireland and at Carnegie Mellon University. His first job out of school was in marketing at Universal Pictures, and after several years working in Hollywood he returned to the Gulf Coast to teach for four years at the University of South Alabama. He later served as Tennessee Williams playwright-in-residence at Sewanee, a role that has shaped the theatrical, character-driven style of his novels.
Building a Trilogy Around Agent Yeager
Yeager and Weaver first appeared separately before “Broken Wing” brought them together. Lakeman’s debut novel, “The Shadow Catchers,” published in 2006, introduced Yeager as an FBI special agent working child-kidnapping cases who repeatedly steps outside the rules when he feels it necessary, eventually landing himself suspended from the Bureau. The second book, “Chillwater Cove,” set in Tennessee, shifted focus to Special Agent Peggy Weaver as she investigated cases involving child abuse and pornography.
“Broken Wing” opens with Yeager reinstated to the FBI and newly engaged to Weaver, only for the couple’s personal life to be put on hold when Yeager is recruited for a dangerous undercover assignment in New Orleans. His task is to infiltrate and help break up a violent organized-crime ring while working to rescue a young woman being held hostage. He goes in posing as a “broken wing” — an agent disgraced and drummed out of the Bureau who has turned rogue and is willing to join the criminals he’s investigating as he seeks revenge for his own downfall.
Lakeman said he built the Yeager character around a specific idea of what the FBI is meant to be at its best. The bureau, he noted, started out largely digging up political scandal, but its mission shifted in 1932 after the kidnapping and killing of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son led to the Lindbergh Law, which gave federal agents the lead role in kidnapping cases. “I’ve always loved this idea of the FBI as an organization that finds lost children,” Lakeman said, adding that he wanted Yeager to be a flawed but fundamentally decent agent for whom protecting the innocent is the only part of the job that matters.
Bringing Dracula Into the Present
Lakeman also wrote a new adaptation of “Dracula” for the Playhouse in the Park in Mobile, moving Bram Stoker’s story from Victorian England to the present day. He said the goal was to shake off the cliches built up around decades of stage versions descended from the Balderston and Deane adaptation that launched Bela Lugosi’s career — capes, rubber bats and melodramatic Victorian dialogue that can feel dated to modern audiences raised on Twilight and True Blood.
Revisiting Stoker’s original novel, Lakeman said he was struck by how modern it actually was for its time, with references to Edison phonographs, typewriters and blood transfusions, plus a cast of mostly young characters apart from the Count himself. He said his version aims to restore Dracula as a proud, cold and predatory figure, pushing back against softer modern portrayals of vampires. “While vampires do live forever, that isn’t necessarily a good thing,” he said, “and maybe there are one or two things about being human that aren’t so bad.”
What’s Next
Lakeman said he has a fourth Yeager-Weaver book in the works, but he is currently taking a break from the series to write a stand-alone thriller with elements of cutting-edge technology and, he hinted, a touch of the supernatural inspired by his work on Dracula.
Asked for advice for other writers on the Alabama coast, Lakeman said not to worry too much about publication as validation. “What’s much harder is writing something you can be proud of,” he said, adding that finishing a project matters more than perfecting it. He also pushed back on the idea that Gulf Coast writers should limit themselves to local subject matter, pointing to Tolkien and Shakespeare as writers whose work grew from a specific place into something far broader. “Give yourself permission to write things you know nothing about,” he said, “and let your curiosity fill the empty spaces.”