Damien Hunter

Damien Hunter was born in Bakersfield, California in 1965. In his youth he worked as a fishmonger's assistant and a clerk in a liquor store before attending the University of California at Berkeley. During his Berkeley years he took a summer internship at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., where the CIA attempted to recruit him after he interrupted a presentation to ask agency representatives about an operation in Beirut that had gone wrong. He graduated from Berkeley in 1988. After earning a degree from Hastings College of the Law, he embarked on a career in government, working in the California Legislature for the next 30 years and developing expertise in firearms, unmanned aerial systems, and the regulation of cannabis. He now works as a private consultant, dividing his time between Sacramento and the Bay Area. His first novel, Secrets of State, won a Writer’s Digest Honorable Mention Award for Genre Fiction in 2004.