In between booking suspects and taking his kids to volleyball practice, Adam Plantinga sneaks in as many minutes as he can to write. The San Francisco police sergeant – who spent seven years as a rookie Milwaukee cop in the 2000s – published his first novel, The Ascent, in January, after writing two nonfiction books about policing. The novel’s already received accolades from such thriller legends as Harlan Coben and James Rollins. “If I have an advantage as a writer, it’s that [as a cop,] I see things other writers don’t,” says Plantinga, who grew up in Michigan and graduated from Marquette University in 1995.
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The Ascent follows a wrongly jailed police officer who, when his maximum-security prison malfunctions and releases its inmates, must team up with a touring grad student to escape. “There are fight scenes that are informed by law enforcement training,” Plantinga says.
Many of those insights come from Plantinga’s time with the MPD. There, his partner was Officer Rolf Mueller – who was well known for arresting Jeffrey Dahmer – and he says he learned a lot from Mueller’s professional approach to even the most dangerous, emotional situations.
“If my wife could handle the cold, I never would have left Milwaukee,” he says. “I love that town.”
Plantinga is currently editing the sequel to The Ascent, which is slated for publication in 2025.
