The best fictional detectives are mysteries unto themselves: hard-bitten, world-weary, troubled souls who keep the dark, uncomfortable corners of their past clearly marked off-limits by yellow police tape.

So it comes as a surprise when the moodiest of the lot, L.A. Homicide Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch, suddenly opens up as never before in Lost Light, case number nine in Michael Connelly’s streetwise nocturne on the seamy side of Hollywood.

Here, Bosch narrates his own story for the first time. Connelly’s only previous foray into first-person narrative appeared in The Poet (1996), a non-Bosch novel and longstanding favorite with fans.

"It was actually pretty hard at first—more than at first, for a good long period," Connelly admits. "I had written eight novels that had Bosch in them, all in third person, so you kind of get into a routine of how to project to the reader what he’s thinking and what he’s working on.

"When you go into first person, all bets are off. You find yourself feeling like you’re cheating the reader if you hold anything back. I think that’s one of the things that was good about the old Harry; I was able to hold things back and kind of spring them on the reader when I wanted to."

In Lost Light, we pick up the ever-brooding Bosch nine months after he has turned in his badge (at the end of last year’s bestseller, City of Bones). He has kicked his two-pack-a-day habit, bought a used Mercedes SUV and signed on for sax lessons to fill the void left by the job. Too restless to retire, he decides to poke into an unsolved murder case. The trail soon lands him at the center of yet another hornet’s nest of lies and cover-ups, this one involving not only the FBI but the new Homeland Security Department, as well.

Lost Light is Connelly’s shortest and lightest Bosch. Not coincidentally, it is also his first since moving his wife and young daughter from Los Angeles to Tampa two years ago. It was a homecoming for Connelly, who grew up in Fort Lauderdale and worked as a teen at Bahia Mar, the marina where John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee moored his beloved houseboat, the Busted Flush.

Connelly admits the change of scenery worked wonders.

"I have found that moving away has changed my way of looking at L.A., and that has kind of re-invigorated me," he says.

So it was naturally time to shake things up a bit for Bosch as well.

"As a writer, you’ve got to keep moving or you get stale. Even the best series seem to have their down moments or stale moments. I’m just searching for ways to avoid that. I don’t know if this book does that, but it helped re-energize me to take Harry in a new direction, both in his fictional life and in my writing life, by working in first person with him. All of that added up to make this one of the better writing periods I have had, and as a believer that what happens in the writing process happens in the reading process, I hope that this new direction will be a successful one—for him and me."

A lot has happened in our world since we last saw Bosch. It was perhaps inevitable that 9/11 and its repercussions would figure into Lost Light.

"It goes along with my continuing belief that contemporary crime novels are much more immediate in terms of their reflection of society than any other form of fiction. That’s one of the reasons that I’m drawn to them and like them," says Connelly. "Like everyone, I think the world has changed since Sept. 11th. It’s changed for the better in some ways and for the worse in others, and it’s a worthy thing to look at in fiction."

In Lost Light, Bosch confronts REACT (for Rapid Response Enforcement and Counter Terrorism), a "by-any-means" special unit of the FBI whose unchecked powers are frightening even to its own agents.

Connelly admits he’s as perplexed as the next guy by the new landscape of post-9/11 law enforcement.

"It’s kind of changed the way we do business," he says. "Hopefully I have drawn forth both sides, and have Harry Bosch stuck in the middle. That’s how I feel, too: stuck in the middle. On some days I think, what are we doing? Why have we gone so extreme in changing the rules? Then on other days I think, we’ve got to get out there and do more. I’ve got a six-year-old daughter, and on those days I’m all for throwing every rule to the wind and doing what we have to do. I have the same kind of dilemma everybody has."

Lost Light ends on an unusually happy note for this generally somber series. Appropriately, Connelly chose to mark the occasion by pressing at his own expense a CD of cool jazz classics entitled "Dark Sacred Night: The Music of Harry Bosch," to give to devoted fans at book signings. It’s the music that Connelly listens to when he crafts his Bosch novels and the ones Harry often slides into the CD player.

"Music is pretty important in the book," Connelly says. "This isn’t the music of my choice in my life; I probably know more about rock and roll and blues than I do about jazz. But it seems appropriate for him. He’s a loner and this kind of music plays into that."

Connelly plans to let Harry tell it again for one more outing as a PI. After that, he’s thinking of luring him out of retirement to work with the L.A. District Attorney’s office on a special project tracking down unsolved "cold cases."

But rest assured that, unlike his creator, Bosch will remain firmly entrenched in the City of Angels, though an occasional side trip isn’t out of the question.

"For one thing, I’m still fascinated with L.A. to a higher degree than I’m fascinated by my new surroundings in Florida," he says. "On a commercial level, it could possibly be detrimental to my career to start writing about South Tampa or Fort Lauderdale. My books have often had the characters go elsewhere. And if Harry does go down the road of cold cases, they can lead anywhere."

Jay Lee MacDonald is a writer based in Florida.

A victim turns the tables on her attacker in a powerful new thriller If Jilliane Hoffman’s fiction debut, Retribution, seems sinfully rich in the stuff we crave most in a good legal thriller, it’s because she prepared the book from scratch using only the finest ingredients: one part Thomas Harris, one part James Patterson and one part John Grisham. The result is a psychological nail-biter that moves at lightning speed through a series of jury-jolting courtroom revelations. The former Miami prosecutor had a killer idea for a psychological thriller about a rape victim who ends up prosecuting her assailant. At her husband’s suggestion, Hoffman left her high-profile dream job as the regional legal advisor to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the state equivalent of the FBI, to stay at home in Fort Lauderdale with their two children, ages four and six, and write fiction.

While the book-buying public will deliver its verdict shortly, Retribution has already been found guilty of movie blockbuster potential by Warner Bros., which paid seven figures for the film rights. Five top actresses Jodie Foster, Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger and Gwyneth Paltrow are vying for the lead. Production is expected to begin this summer.

Pardon Hoffman for being a bit thunderstruck at her beginner’s luck. After all, she had never written more than a legal brief before creating Retribution.

“What a week I had! The book was auctioned off on a Monday, it was sold in five countries by Wednesday, and then it was sold to Warner Brothers on Friday. I keep thinking I’m probably going to die a very violent death because I had such a great year. Somebody should not have that much good luck in one year.” Early buzz hints that Retribution could be this year’s Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow’s 1987 debut that cast a similarly jaundiced eye toward our often-fallible justice system.

The novel opens with the brutal rape of Chloe Larson, a New York law student who is about to marry and embark on a promising legal career. Her attacker, who wears a clown’s mask, is never found and continues to stalk her, derailing her life.

Fast-forward a decade. Chloe has reinvented herself as C.J. Townsend, a hard-nosed Miami state attorney and go-to prosecutor in high-profile capital cases whose past remains her closely guarded secret. When police apprehend a serial killer dubbed Cupid by the media (his m.o. involves surgically removing the hearts of his female victims), C.J. can’t wait to prosecute him until she hears his voice in court and, to her horror, finds herself face to face with her long-ago assailant.

Can she ethically proceed with the prosecution? Should she come clean about her relationship to the accused and risk having the case reassigned to a less competent prosecutor? Or, if she keeps her secret, can she hold herself together long enough to win a conviction? It’s a tasty dilemma, the first of several in this well-plotted page-turner that culminates in a surprise ending that will leave readers analyzing C.J.’s choices for days to come.

“That’s exactly what I was after,” Hoffman admits. “I didn’t want to have a happy ending. I wanted it to spur discussion.” Hoffman had a tough jury of one to satisfy: herself. “I wanted to make sure that it was real. I can’t stand reading a legal book and I get to a part and think, this would never happen and that would never happen and medically that couldn’t happen.” C.

J. Townsend bears much in common with her creator. Although Hoffman has never been a victim of rape, she has worked closely with victims of domestic violence and prosecuted serial rapists.

“I’ve had many a rape victim tell me their story, and as a female, if you close your eyes and think about what it might be like, you can envision it,” she says. Hoffman defends her decision to open the novel with the brutally believable rape and its even creepier aftermath. “The rape had to be such a brutal act in order for you to understand her trauma in getting over it and her need for revenge,” she says. “When you can feel the terror that the character has gone through, I think you can really empathize with the decisions she has to make later on.” Retribution also pits two women lawyers C.J. and defense attorney Lourdes Rubio against each other in what has been a male-dominated genre. “I had scenes in my head of a conflict between two females over something that would unite females and yet tear them apart. It sounds strange but it seemed like rape was one of those issues that only women could really experience a certain way, and yet if you put them on opposite ends of the same issue, it would make interesting dynamics.” Could Hoffman ever envision herself crossing the aisle and defending the accused? “I could if they were innocent, but you can’t go forward with a defense based on that premise,” she says. “Maybe I’m jaded by the system, but I couldn’t use my skills to get somebody off, then subsequently find out that they were truly guilty. It just seems to go against everything that I believe in.” With a hefty movie deal in pocket and a sequel already in the works, it seems likely that Hoffman’s future court appearances will be strictly confined to jury duty. Jay MacDonald is a writer based in Mississippi.

Musician Reed Arvin hits new note with legal thrillers Although there’s action aplenty in The Last Goodbye, the real thrill in this thriller is tuning into the caustic and nimble mind of protagonist Jack Hammond. Ejected from his high-dollar Atlanta law firm over an affair with a client, Hammond now supports himself (and a gorgeous secretary who reads Pottery Barn catalogs) by representing impoverished defendants in criminal court. “The words that enable me to pay three dollars more than minimum wage to the beautiful Miss McClendon,” Hammond reflects, “are these: If you cannot afford an attorney, the court will appoint one for you.’ ” When one of his clients dies under peculiar circumstances, Hammond steps in to find out why. His snooping leads him into the arcane world of clinical drug testing and pairs him romantically with an alluring young opera singer who has some disturbing secrets of her own.

Speaking to BookPage from his home in Nashville, Arvin admits that he’s rather taken by this new character he’s created. “I’m pretty sure that the next book [after the one now in progress] will be a Jack Hammond book,” he says. “I love the fact that he has this sort of wry insight into life. Even when all hell is breaking loose, he sees the humor in it. That’s really attractive to me. I want that in my books. I’m not going to write dour, heavy, brooding stories.” The Last Goodbye is Arvin’s second mystery with a lawyer as hero. “Both my parents were lawyers,” he notes. “My mom was a judge. I like to say that I studied law at the Les and Kay Arvin Dinner Table School of Law. It was just in the air. However, I’m not particularly attracted to law as a profession, and I don’t write procedurals. Having a lawyer as a protagonist is great because it’s a way to enter human drama. A lawyer enters a life when things are going haywire, so that’s a great starting point to tell a story. But I’m not particularly attracted to legal minutiae.” A native of Kansas, Arvin has spent most of his life as a musician and record producer. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees both in piano from the University of North Texas and the University of Miami. “Miami is so multicultural,” he says. “I got involved in some tremendous Latin bands, bands that were playing Caribbean music, salsa bands, reggae bands. I got a tremendous education in life in different cultures, one that I could have never had without being in the music business. Then I came to Nashville.” Arvin arrived in Nashville “a good 20 years ago,” he recalls, and soon took a job playing keyboard in Amy Grant’s band. He toured and recorded with the pop/gospel diva for four years. After that, Grant’s advisors tapped him to produce records for contemporary Christian music artists. “But all during that time,” he says, “I kind of had in the back of my mind that I wanted to write. I loved books, I loved great writing and I always wondered, what if . . . ?” The Wind In The Wheat, Arvin’s debut novel, came out in 1996 and found him in familiar territory. It was about a gifted young singer who gets caught up in the Christian music industry. Alas, it attracted little notice. Then, in 2001, Scribner published his first thriller, The Will. “I feel like, in a lot of ways,” he says, “that The Will was the beginning of my real writing career. That’s when I became mainstream, signed with a real agent and got a great publisher.” Instead of Kansas, which was a major setting for his first two novels, Arvin opted to locate The Last Goodbye in Atlanta. “It’s really the center of the new, affluent black culture,” he explains. “It’s ground zero. It has more in common with the United Nations than it does magnolias.” (Although Hammond is white, his love interest and some of his foes are black.) Arvin handles race matter-of-factly, bowing neither to sentimentality nor political correctness. He reached this calm perspective, he says, through his work as a musician. “Music is similar to athletics in that it is really performance-based. If you can carry the freight, nobody cares where you came from. I spent my whole life working with Latins, blacks, whites, Asians. It didn’t matter. It was all performance-oriented: Can you play? So I don’t have a lot of politically correct baggage.” In plotting how The Last Goodbye murders would be done, Arvin dipped into real life and then anchored his findings with serious research. “I had cancer,” he says, “so I had a lot of personal experience with powerful drugs that can heal you but also leave their mark on you. My own story ends well. But I had an uncle who had a much more serious and lethal kind of cancer. He basically made it a two-year mission to try to stay alive on clinical trials. So I watched from a distance the sort of mixed blessing these trials can have. That got me interested in a clinical trial as a place to set a thriller.” To be certain he was scientifically on target, Arvin enlisted an expert on gene-based synthetic drug research and persuaded him to vet every page.

Arvin’s next book is set in Nashville and has a prosecutor as its main character. Despite his love of performing and producing, he vows that he’s totally committed to writing. “Around about the time The Will came out,” he says, “a lot of things happened to me: I got divorced, I got cancer, I changed careers, my dad had a heart attack. It was unbelievable. It’s like the five stresses that you’re supposed to get in a lifetime, I got in 90 days. That’s when I made some real choices about what I was going to do with the rest of my life and where I was going to head. I knew this was my second act.” Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

Tucked away in the closet of Michael Simon’s New York apartment is a roll of butcher paper that measures roughly three feet wide and 16 feet long. Unfurl it and you’ll discover a detailed roadmap of the intricately woven plot of his totally absorbing first novel, Dirty Sally, a detective thriller set in Austin, Texas, during the late 1980s.

"The plot was the biggest challenge," Simon says during a call to his home. "There are so many things going on in this book. They have to interact, and they have to be real and dramatic and develop in a compelling way."

Compelling, Dirty Sally certainly is. As the novel opens, detective Dan Reles, a native New Yorker and a Jew transplanted to Austin, is coming apart at the seams after the recent death of his partner, Joey Velez, the first non-white officer to make the city’s homicide squad. Reles’ weird, angry behavior after his partner’s fatal car crash makes him the subject of an internal affairs investigation. The highly publicized case of a young prostitute killed and dismembered in an Austin crack house offers Reles a way to salvage his career. So with the clock ticking, he sets out to identify the victim – whom the squad nicknames "Dirty Sally" – and find her murderer. The problem is that his investigation leads him to a series of shady real estate development deals that involve the city’s most powerful citizens. And, as it turns out, not all of Reles’ homicide department colleagues are eager to see him redeem himself.

Simon says it took something like five years and 15 drafts to engineer the dramatic intersections of scenes and storylines that make his first Dan Reles detective novel (he is now at work on the second book in the series) so difficult to put down. To support himself during his long construction project, Simon taught writing and acting in New York for a number of years and then took a job as a proofreader for an advertising agency. For three years he wrote every morning, went to work in the afternoon, came home late at night, went to bed, then got up and did the same thing all over again. "From the night I decided to write the book, I was never half-hearted about it," he says.

As Simon tells it, he was inspired to write Dirty Sally by a conversation with his brother, who was intent on writing a military thriller and thereby achieve fame, fortune and immortality in the process. "I thought, well, there must be a way I can get a piece of this," he says, laughing. In fact, six or seven other friends also boarded the thriller-writing bandwagon. But absolutely everybody else dropped out except Simon.

Part of what sustained him was the memory of the searing experiences he’d had as a probation officer in Austin, a job he took to support himself after his graduate fellowship at the University of Texas ran out. At that time Texas, which Simon says has a long history of imposing "ridiculously long prison sentences," had explosively overcrowded prisons and, as a result, had begun undersentencing dangerous felons, churning hard cases out into the parole system. "It’s not that I particularly believe in the prison system," Simon says, "but there are some people who shouldn’t be on the street."

The effect on Simon and his coworkers was profoundly demoralizing. "I think that was the core of me wanting to write this book about law enforcement, because the work itself can be so damaging. You develop this really dark humor and you eat a lot," he says.

Simon’s main character, detective Dan Reles, doesn’t overeat but he has the dark humor of a moral hero in an immoral situation. "When Dan makes a joke it’s a dark joke," Simon says. "There are things he finds disturbing and wrong, things that fill him with contempt. So he makes a joke about it and the joke lets off some tension, but it doesn’t make him happy."

An inverted moral universe suffused with a hard dark humor is the essence of a noir thriller, and in Dirty Sally, Simon offers his own unique contribution to the genre. "The structure of a regular mystery is politically conservative," Simon says. "You have an orderly world, then one utterly extreme crime takes place and the world is totally messed up, and then a detective comes in and solves the crime and the world is fine again." Simons says the masters of noir fiction writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler – turned this convention on its head: after the crime is solved, the world is "still awful."

Thus, one of the things that’s most surprising and daring about Simon’s version of the noir thriller is that he’s decided to locate its action in sunny, optimistic Austin. "I moved to Austin in the late 1980s," Simon says. "It was this incredibly beautiful town, clean, friendly. Then I got this funny job and suddenly I was looking at the other part of town, the poor part of town. I was seeing who was living by working really, really hard and who was living by doing something illegal or illicit: dealing drugs, working as a prostitute or as a pimp. And it shook up my perspective."

So Simon paints a gritty portrait of a police department divided by racial tensions, neighborhoods decimated by drugs, and a city whose financial and political power structure promotes privatization of public resources for personal gain. Through the murk of this moral and political corruption the emotionally wounded Dan Reles tries to get his man.

For all the background he manages to weave so adroitly into his tale, Simon says he "doesn’t mean Dirty Sally to be an issue-driven drama; this isn’t a political diatribe or a bumper sticker. What I really want is for the reader to enjoy the ride."

With its intricate weave of plotlines, authentic detail and strong, no-nonsense writing, Dirty Sally does indeed offer a good ride. A very good ride.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

Russian homicide detective Arkady Renko's cases have mirrored the historic upheavals within the Soviet Union during the past quarter of a century. He has battled his old-guard bosses and the KGB in Gorky Park, been thrown into exile aboard a Soviet trawler in Polar Star, returned to confront the rise of the post-Soviet Mafia in Red Square and, in a busman's holiday, investigated a friend's murder during a tour of Russia's orphan, Cuba, in Havana Bay.

In his latest adventure, Wolves Eat Dogs, the indomitable inspector confronts crimes against man and nature when a murder trail leads into the frightening, fascinating world of modern man's biggest technological blunder, Chernobyl.

When wealthy New Russian Pasha Ivanov falls (or is pushed) 11 stories to his death, Renko's business-as-usual superiors rule it a suicide, case closed. But a saltshaker found beneath the body leads Renko to an eerie discovery: Ivanov's sumptuous digs are white-hot with cesium 137, a deadly radioactive isotope.

Two years ago, popular suspense writer Martin Cruz Smith visited Chernobyl against the advice of almost everyone. Like his fictional alter ego, Smith listened to his instincts instead.

"When I first broached the subject of Chernobyl, everyone said that's the last thing anyone would want to read about, it's so grim," he says by phone from his home in San Rafael, California. "But when I went there, it was so much more interesting than I first thought. It was interesting to see people under such pressure. There was incredible heroism among the so-called liquidators who were cleaning up that mess. Many of them carried radioactive materials in their hands with absolutely no idea how dangerous that was, but some of them did understand and they sacrificed themselves." Many Americans assume Chernobyl was abandoned after the 1986 disaster. Not so. The 135,000 inhabitants of the two closest towns, Pripyat and Chernobyl, were evacuated, but the workers who manned the three functioning reactors and the liquidators who tried to contain the damage within the fourth reactor stayed behind. The last of the active Chernobyl reactors was finally shut down last year.

Smith recalls his first look at the sarcophagus that surrounds, though hardly "contains," the world-famous number four reactor; radioactivity from it continues to seep into the groundwater that feeds the Dnepr River.

"It looks like a monument to a disaster," he says. "It strongly resembles a cage, a cage that looks very impressive at first sight but then the more you study and know about it, the flimsier it becomes." In fact, Chernobyl has become the unofficial sick joke of the once-proud Ukraine. There was the unnecessary low-power test that triggered the chain reaction that caused a deadly fireball to blow the roof off the tower, contaminating the Northern Hemisphere. Then came an unexplainable three-day silence from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev during which children played in the green foam, the plant's protection against radioactive release. After the forced evacuation of Pripyat, the government built a new town, Slavutych, on a radioactive site it called its "cesium patch." "Pripyat really lets you know that things have gone very much awry; you walk into a city of 50,000 and you're the only one," Smith recalls. "But then they moved the workers to Slavutych and planted them on radioactive ground. How could they screw up so badly?" Workers clad in camouflage commute daily from Slavutych to the reactors, passing through radiation detectors frequently. A microdot of cesium or plutonium invisible to the naked eye is enough to send a Geiger counter needle off the gage. In his week inside the Zone of Exclusion, Smith carried a dosimeter constantly.

"Some of the veterans get these cavalier attitudes. I had a guide with me in a Pripyat amusement park who called me over and said, Put your dosimeter here.' So I put it down and the needle just flew off, a thousand times normal. I said, why are we standing here?! It was just a random spot in the town that was not marked by a stake and warnings." In Smith's new novel, one of Ivanov's vice presidents is found in Pripyat with his throat slashed. Murder means little in a town that has seen so much death. To solve the case, Renko enlists the help of Eva, a sexy but deeply cynical physician who treats the scavengers and old Ukrainians who have returned to Chernobyl despite its deadly toxicity.

The title of the novel, Wolves Eat Dogs, refers to a leitmotif expertly woven throughout the narrative. Wolves in fact have returned to Chernobyl in great numbers, as have wild boar, deer and other wildlife, all of it radioactive from wandering through the so-called "black villages" and numerous hot zones that will remain for thousands of years. For Chernobyl, and indeed the former Soviet Union, explosive change has brought about a new natural order, a wolf-eat-dog world.

In retrospect, Smith considers Chernobyl one of the first irreparable cracks that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. "The Russian authorities would like to say it was human error, that 15 fools got together and did this thing," he says. "But in fact, the reactor was unstable at low levels of output and this piece of information had not been relayed to the technicians who were running the test." Smith says the catastrophic events at Chernobyl brought to light the secrecy at the heart of the Soviet system. "The Russian people definitely saw it as the worst example of that," he notes, and the three-day delay before the general alarm was issued led to "a real collapse in the credibility and belief in the state." Jay MacDonald happened to be driving through Middletown, Pennsylvania, during the Three Mile Island nuclear incident.

There is a sense of symmetry as I sit in a cozy cabin overlooking the Grand Canyon's Bright Angel Trail and begin collating the notes of my interview with Southwestern mystery author Tony Hillerman. Hillerman's latest novel, Skeleton Man, takes place in the Grand Canyon, reuniting veteran Native American policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee for an investigation into the aftermath of a plane crash, the worst airline disaster of its day, which took place more than 40 years before. Among the victims was a diamond dealer carrying a briefcase full of diamonds, one of which has recently surfaced in a local crime.

It's another fascinating scenario from Hillerman, an Oklahoma native and longtime journalist who launched his Native American mystery series in 1970 with the publication of The Blessing Way. Since then, he has turned out 15 more Navajo mysteries, as well as several other novels, nonfiction books about the West, essay collections and a memoir. From his home in Albuquerque, Hillerman talked to BookPage about his long career and his new book. What was intended as a short interview turned into an hour-long conversation on a variety of topics, ranging from Grand Canyon history to homeland security, only a small portion of which are covered here.

BookPage: Can you tell us a bit about the 1956 airline crash over the Grand Canyon that plays a pivotal role in Skeleton Man?
Tony Hillerman: Sure. The crash took place on June 30, 1956. Two planes were involved, a United Airlines DC-7 and a TWA Constellation. There has been speculation that one of the passengers requested that the pilot turn the plane a bit to afford a better view of the canyon, but I think that is largely speculation. In any event, there was a midair crash, and 128 passengers and crew were killed. It actually caused the FAA to revamp their regulations regarding airspace usage, regulations that remain in place to this day.

BP : You've summoned Joe Leaphorn out of retirement to take part in Skeleton Man. Are there any parallels between Leaphorn and yourself in this regard?
TH: [laughs] I am 82 years old. I imagine that I will keep on writing as long as anyone wants to keep reading. In fact, Leaphorn figures quite prominently in my upcoming novel [a follow-up to Skeleton Man], which will tie up some loose ends such as the ongoing romance between Jim Chee and Bernie Manuelito.

BP: Jim Chee is, as you say, something of a romantic, while Joe Leaphorn is a bit of a pragmatist by comparison. Do you identify more with one than the other?
TH: I would say that Leaphorn is more an extension of my personality than Chee. He is closer to me in age and attitude, and he can be a bit grouchy from time to time.

BP: Your books are icons of mystery fiction; you have virtually invented the subgenre of Native American mysteries. How do you account for their ongoing popularity?
TH: You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart. But an author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place. You try to create characters who invite a strong reaction from readers, whether pity, contempt, empathy, whatever.

BP: A number of television adaptations of your Leaphorn/Chee novels have been aired over the past few years. What is your reaction to seeing your characters on the big (or small) screen?
TH: Well, Wes Studi [who plays Joe Leaphorn in PBS adaptations] is perfect. In fact, when an image of Joe Leaphorn crosses my mind, it is Wes Studi's face I see. Adam Beach [who plays Jim Chee] is an excellent actor as well, but much too handsome.

BP: This has nothing whatsoever to do with the current book, but Finding Moon, the tale of an average fellow who goes to Vietnam to discover what has happened to his missing brother, has always been a particular favorite of mine. Can you give us some insight into how that book came about?
TH: [laughs again] Well, you certainly know the right questions to ask! Finding Moon is a favorite of mine as well. It would have been my first book. It was originally set in the Belgian Congo during their civil war in the aftermath of the Belgian armed forces' pullout. What with work and family obligations, I wasn't able to get it finished quickly, and then the situation changed in the Belgian Congo, rendering some of my plot ideas unworkable. I kept it on a shelf for all those years, and was able to rework the bones of the story using Vietnam as the geographic focal point. Although I wasn't able to get a visa for Vietnam, I was able to talk with swift boat veterans and others to get a feel for the time and place, and I visited a tropical prison in the Philippines to get a sense of what a Vietnamese prison might have been like.

BP: Now that I've posed a number of questions that either I or our readers were curious about, is there anything that you would like to add?
TH: Well, I have another new book called Kilroy Was There. It was published by Kent State University as a World War II memorial. I was asked to write the text for the book, but I replied that I was "much too busy." Then I saw some of the photographs by Frank Kessler and I knew I had to do it. The photos depict down-and-dirty street fighting, the realities of war with no sugarcoating or romanticizing.