Introducing Sloane Briggs – and the Book That Started It All
There’s a moment in With Compliments, the Nun that stopped me cold while I was writing it.
Sloane Briggs, decorated Marine, intelligence operative, survivor of things most people can’t imagine, is on her knees in a convent garden, tending marigolds. It’s dawn. The light is gold. For the first time in twelve years, she isn’t carrying a weapon, planning an extraction, or outrunning a ghost from her past. She’s just… breathing.
And then a scream shatters everything.
That moment is the heart of this book. That collision between earned peace and unavoidable purpose, between the woman Sloane is trying to become and the warrior she will always be.
Who Is Sloane Briggs?
Before I tell you about the book, let me tell you about the woman.
Sloane doesn’t arrive on the page fully formed. She arrives at Parris Island as a teenager with a martial arts background and something to prove, something she doesn’t yet have the words for. The Marine Corps gives her discipline, language, intelligence tradecraft, and lethal capability. It also gives her a place to hide.
Because behind the squared shoulders and the marksmanship scores is a girl who, at thirteen, had her trust shattered by someone who should have protected her. That wound, buried under years of deployments and deliberate distance, is the engine of everything that follows.
By the time we meet Sloane at the beginning of this story, she’s leaving the Corps after twelve years. Not in disgrace. Not with fanfare. She’s just done. Bone-deep done. She drives west alone, looking for something she can’t name.
She finds it , or it finds her, through a wrought-iron gate at the edge of a walking trail in Billings, Montana.
Saint Helena’s Convent and the Nun Who Saw Everything
Sister Agnes is one of my favorite characters I’ve ever written, and I didn’t expect that. She was created in the image of my Mother – elderly, gentle, and almost impossibly perceptive. She emerges from the convent gates on a quiet morning walk and simply sees Sloane, not the Marine, not the operative, but the person underneath all of it.
Their conversation changes everything.
What unfolds at Saint Helena’s is not a slow, soft story of a soldier finding religion. It’s harder than that, and more real. The convent asks Sloane to do something her entire adult life trained her to avoid: sit with herself. To stop moving long enough to hear what her wounds have been trying to tell her.
“This life is not an escape. It’s a confrontation.” — Mother Superior
Sloane is ready for that confrontation. She just doesn’t know that a very different kind of confrontation is coming.
The Day Peace Ends
Sloane is in the garden. The marigolds are wet with morning dew. She is learning – slowly, imperfectly – how to simply exist in a moment rather than survive it.
Then the scream comes.
A group of hard men have breached the convent walls. They’re looking for something hidden in the basement, ancient relics, and they are not asking nicely. They’ve shoved Sister Beatrice, a woman in her seventies, across the courtyard. The other sisters are cornered and terrified.
What happens next is breathtaking and a little bit heartbreaking. Because Sloane doesn’t want to be this person anymore. She doesn’t want to pick up a weapon, assess a threat, and move through danger with lethal precision. She came here to be something else.
But she’s also exactly who these women need in this moment.
She grabs a shovel.
The fight that follows is not glamorous. It’s desperate and close and brutal, the kind of violence that leaves marks on the person doing it as well as the people it’s done to. And when it’s over, Sloane stands in the chapel doorway, blood on her habit, the sisters avoiding her eyes, and realizes with crushing clarity that the world has followed her into her sanctuary.
And one of the sisters was part of it.
More Than an Action Thriller
Here’s what I want you to understand about this book: the violence is real, but it’s not the point.
With Compliments, the Nun is a story about what happens when the armor we build to protect ourselves stops being protection and starts being a prison. It’s about trauma- real, ugly, persistent trauma – and the non-linear, imperfect work of healing. It’s about faith not as doctrine but as a daily practice of choosing to believe that peace is possible, even for people like Sloane.
It’s also a story about loyalty. About a woman who calls in an old debt from a former colleague, who navigates local law enforcement, who refuses to abandon the women who sheltered her even when every tactical instinct tells her to move.
And woven through all of it is Max, her partner in ways that take the whole book to fully understand. Their relationship is quiet and complicated and utterly human: the kind of connection that grows in the spaces between crisis.
The book ends with Sloane and Max on a terrace overlooking Barcelona. The Mediterranean is in front of them. The city hums with life. She has earned this moment – every brutal, honest, hard-won page of it.
“The convent taught her that peace wasn’t found in the absence of conflict but in the presence of love.”
What’s Coming: The Sloane Briggs Series
With Compliments, the Nun is Book 1 in a series that is already taking shape. Readers who finish this book will find Sloane stepping into a new life in Barcelona – but those who look closely will notice something already moving in the shadows. A voice on a frequency. A photograph of a green van with a penciled inscription. A file marked TOLEDO.
Sloane doesn’t know it yet. She’s watching the sun set over the Mediterranean, her hand in Max’s. She soon will.
Book 2: Toledo (in development) Sloane’s pursuit of a ghost: a female intelligence operative she first encountered during her military service in Central America, a voice so disciplined and precise it became an obsession. Decades later, that voice resurfaces. And the implications reach far beyond what Sloane initially understands. If With Compliments, the Nun is about healing, Toledo is about reckoning.
Book 3: The Meridian Protocol (in development) A $547 million network is systematically destabilizing U.S. institutions; funded by America’s most dangerous foreign adversaries. At the center of it is Dr. Elena Voss: a former CIA officer, Sloane’s intellectual equal, and the most dangerous adversary she’s ever faced. Voss isn’t fighting with weapons. She’s fighting with narratives. And she’s winning.
Why I Wrote This Book
This book was born from a collision of two ideas: the unbreakable spirit of a warrior and the aching, human need for peace.
I wanted to write a female protagonist who didn’t have to choose between being strong and being wounded because real strength never requires that choice. Sloane is a Marine and a survivor; a woman trying to garden in peace and a fighter who won’t let the vulnerable go unprotected. She is all of those things at the same time, and none of them cancel the others.
I also wanted to write honestly about trauma. About the way it follows you into quiet places. About the way healing isn’t a destination, it’s a practice, like prayer, like tending a garden. You do it every day, and some days it doesn’t work, some days it does.
The nuns at Saint Helena’s taught me that, as they taught Sloane.
Next Month — Post 2 of 12
Next month we go deeper into the character of Sister Agnes, the making of Saint Helena’s Convent as a setting, and what it actually looks like to write a healing arc without sanitizing the wound. The conversation between Sloane and Sister Agnes on that first walk through the pine trees is one of the most important scenes in the book, and we haven’t talked about it nearly enough.
See you in the next post. For now… Standing Guard, Together
SJ Coleman is the author of the Sloane Briggs thriller series. Books 2 and 3 — Toledo and The Meridian Protocol — are currently in development.