RETIRED DETECTIVE
Bill McDonough
37 years in law enforcement and counterterrorism. 9 years on the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Now writing the stories that kept him up at night, and the systems that helped him survive them.
From South Carolina: a multigenerational family memoir, and a recovery protocol built from thirty years on the job — two books, two very different sides of the same career.
About Bill
Bill McDonough spent 37 years in law enforcement, working patrol, numerous detective assignments, Hostage Rescue Team, and Intelligence. He was one of the first officers assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force after September 11, serving nine years in counterterrorism and undercover operations.
After relocating to South Carolina, Bill transitioned to insider threat work at a major tech company and now also consults with the Missouri Attorney General’s Office Cold Case Unit. A heart attack in 2021 turned the same investigative instincts he’d built over a career onto his own body — the process that became After the Adrenaline.
His writing voice is the same one that carried him through three decades of the worst days imaginable: believable first, authentic always, trust earned never assumed.
Why He Writes
After 37 years of sirens, search warrants, and sitting across from people who did terrible things, Bill writes because the stories demanded to be told, not sanitized, not dramatized, but told the way they actually happened.
He writes for the public who deserves to know what really happens behind the badge, and for the men and women still out there who might see themselves in these pages and know they’re not alone.
The Writing
Published • Available Now
After the Adrenaline
A Recovery & Longevity Protocol
A recovery and longevity protocol for first responders, veterans, and anyone who’s lived on adrenaline for too long — part field manual, part survival story, thirty years on the job distilled into what actually works once the uniform comes off.
Published • Available Now
Keepers of the Mojo
Eighty Years of Service and Survival
A WWII Navy dog tag, carried by seven keepers across eighty years of one family’s service — told through Bill’s twenty-five-year St. Louis police career, from Mobile Reserve to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.
In Progress
The Thriller
A commercial fiction thriller built on real FBI JTTF tradecraft. A Task Force Officer in Chicago stumbles into a pipeline of looted antiquities from the Kuwait National Museum, artifacts that disappeared during the Gulf War and never stopped moving. The kind of story only someone who lived it could write.
The Line
In 1945, the U.S. Navy issued a dog tag to a 17-year-old kid from St. Louis. That kid was Bill’s father. The dog tag was carried through Bill’s police career, through his children’s deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and the Horn of Africa, and through 30 years of service that started the day Bill pinned on a badge.
Today it rests with his youngest daughter, a firefighter in South Carolina. Eighty years of American service, one thin piece of metal.
The line doesn’t break. It just finds the next hand.
Bill McDonough | Author 