Alex DeMille talks 'The Tin Men,' his final collaboration with his late father, Nelson DeMille

At a Sept. 20, gathering of family and friends in Garden City to mark the anniversary of celebrated local author Nelson DeMille’s death, anecdotes were shared, pigs in a blanket were passed, and buffet tables were piled high with his novels.

"I told everybody there, ‘Please take the books,’" his son, Alex DeMille, told Newsday. "They’ll be a nice way to remember him."

New memories will be made on Oct. 28, when the father-son writing duo’s third novel, "The Tin Men" (Simon & Schuster, $29), is released. DeMille will also speak about the book and his dad at Theodore's Books in Oyster Bay on Nov. 11.

The publication date arrives 13 months after Nelson’s death on Sept. 17, 2024, at age 81 from esophageal cancer. A tribute in the book — “For my father" — “is brief but heartfelt.

"I remember thinking, ‘How am I going to dedicate this? What am I going to say?’ " said Alex, who worked as a screenwriter and director before authoring novels. "It was hard. I realized I don’t need to say all that much. The simplest expression sometimes is the purest."

"The Tin Men" — like the DeMilles’ previous bestsellers, "The Deserter" (2019) and "Blood Lines" (2023) — follows intrepid Army CID agents Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor.

They’ve been sent to the remote, hush-hush Camp Hayden in the Mojave Desert. They’re there to investigate the death of Major Roger Ames, a scientist who had been conducting classified war games involving lethal autonomous weapons — as in, the tin men.

Early on, we get a description: "Seven-foot tall metallic humanoid machines with two arms, two legs, large torsos, and bucket-shaped head. The only feature on each robot’s ‘face’ was a four-inch-long horizontal black slit."

We’re not in Kansas, anymore Toto. As Brodie and Taylor work the case, the line between human and machine blurs, bringing the deadly dark dimensions of AI warfare and its moral consequences into sharp focus.

"It’s a thriller, and it’s about something larger," said Alex, who lives with his wife and 7-year-old daughter in Brooklyn. "It’s about America, and about a lot of things involving our idea of ourselves as a country, including paranoia and stability."

As he relates in a note to readers in "The Tin Men," the book was a creative and emotional challenge. "My father and I came up with the idea together," he said, adding that they conceived it as "Blood Lines" was published. "We wrote the proposal together."

Nelson’s firsthand experience as a Vietnam War veteran informed the plot. Alex did his own dives into AI and military culture, and he trekked to Fort Irwin, a U.S. Army training facility in California that’s used to prepare troops for combat in realistic scenarios.

According to a process established in their other novels, Alex drafted chapters that Nelson would edit. But as time went by and the chemo took a toll, Nelson eventually put down his pencil. "I had to finish writing the book after my father died," he said.

Completing the book without his co-author — moreover, his father — was doubly strange. "It was weird, and maybe a replacement for grieving because I had this other thing to focus on," Alex said. "It was weird because I’m trying to channel his voice along with my own voice. It was an almost spiritual experience."

He turned in "The Tin Men" draft at the end of 2024. Since then, he has thought a lot about his father's absence. "He was such a presence," he said. "He had such a big life." Nelson was prolific. He wrote nearly two-dozen novels, many of them bestsellers.

"There’s a lot to unwind logistically, a lot to unwind emotionally," Alex said. "I’m constantly reminded of his legacy and his memory. I will always meet people who knew my father, and they'll tell me some story about him I’d never heard before. Ways he’s helped their careers. Ways he’s helped them financially. ”

He’s still taking stock of his relationship with his father. He called their professional collaboration "the honor and privilege of my life."

"It’s not something I really thought about or appreciated until he passed away," he said. "Now I look back at all of our notes. That was his line. That was my line. I remember the process."

Could Taylor and Brodie go on in yet another novel without Nelson? "They could," Alex said. "If a publisher is interested. But it’s not the next thing I want to do."

He has a proposal out for a novel he was developing before his father died — but now, it carries deeper weight. "It’s a thriller," he said, "about grief."