Goodreads asked Kimberly Gabriel:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Kimberly Gabriel In 2011, I was a new mom living in the city and pregnant with my second child when a series of flash mob attacks hit the Chicago streets near our home. The local news became dominated by stories of these teenage mobs, involving up to twenty participants, who would emerge from a heavily populated area to descend on a single victim to mug and attack. Maybe it was the close proximity to where I lived or perhaps it was the random and sudden nature of the attacks—whatever the cause, they terrified me and stuck with me long after we moved out of the city and settled in the nearby suburbs.

Throughout the next several years, as I continued to read stories about similar occurrences throughout Chicago and other cities, my fear of them led me down the “what if” path. What if the attacks became an epidemic? What if they got bigger? What if they grew worse? What type of person would stand up against that kind of violence? From those questions emerged the Swarm, a dark and unpredictable threat, and Lia, the unlikely hero who would fight back against it.

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