For almost 20 years Stephen L. Carter has been carrying a powerful character around in his imagination.

"He was a cold, distant person of enormously strong political views," Carter says during a call to his office at Yale University Law School, "the patriarch of his family, pretty conservative in the sense that a lot of old, traditional black families are conservative. A judge."

While he struggled and experimented with ways to free this character to tell his story, while bits and pieces of novels accumulated in a trunk in his basement, Carter pursued his career as a professor of law and a public intellectual. He wrote such widely praised nonfiction books as The Culture of Disbelief and Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. He appeared frequently as an expert commentator on Nightline and Face the Nation. He wrote often in the popular press and legal journals. He was named William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale.

Finally, about five years ago, Carter, who has known since childhood that he wanted to write novels, discovered the fictional vehicle that would allow the judge—and all the other characters associated with this powerful, controversial personality—to come alive. Well, almost alive. Because one of the intriguing things about The Emperor of Ocean Park is that the dominant personality of the novel—Judge Oliver Garland—dies at home in his study in Washington, D.C., at the beginning of the story.

When Carter finally completed his first novel, its mix of character and action so thrilled those in the publishing world that they clamored to buy the whopping doorstop of a book. Knopf outbid 11 other publishers with a $4 million, two-book deal, and movie makers fell in line soon thereafter, offering a hefty sum for the film rights. The competition garnered newspaper headlines and predictions that the book would be one of the biggest hits of the summer. Adding to the hoopla is Knopf’s decision to launch The Emperor of Ocean Park with a staggering 500,000 first printing.

It’s a hefty gamble on a first-time fiction author, but the publisher is confident readers will flock to this complex literary thriller. Carter deftly weaves together several strands, from the relationships of fathers and sons and husbands and wives to the politics of the Nixon and Reagan eras.

At the center of it all is the recently deceased Judge Garland, who had been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, then forced to withdraw because of his association with a shadowy figure named Jack Ziegler.

Embittered by his treatment by liberals in the Senate, Judge Garland became a darling of the Republican Right and grew increasingly distant from his three surviving children. One of the three, Mariah, does not believe the judge has died of natural causes. She inveigles her brother Talcott, a law professor at a fictional Ivy League law school in an equally fictional town called Elm Harbor, Connecticut, to join her in an investigation of her father’s death. Talcott—Misha to his friends—is the narrator of The Emperor of Ocean Park.

And Talcott has problems of his own. He struggles to hold together his marriage with his disloyal wife, Kimmer, an ambitious attorney on the president’s short-list for the federal bench. As he tries to unravel the clues his father left him in the form of chess problems, he grows increasingly alienated from his colleagues at the law school. His relationship with his young son worsens. He is pursued by a maddening array of people who demand to know about his father’s "arrangements." And, finally, he must contend with the awesome task of discovering who his father really was.

One of the most interesting threads of the book is Carter’s portrayal of the black upper class and black professionals.

"I didn’t grow up around that kind of wealth in the black community, but many people do," Carter says. "Many of these professional families, with their big houses, imported cars and vacation homes, have had money for generations. That is something we don’t hear about very much, and I wanted to talk about that experience a little bit. Another thing I wanted to talk about are some of the day-to-day perceptions of black professionals who work in predominately white places."

Carter says that much of the novel is about perceptions. And he cautions, "It’s not a book of opinion. These things emerged as I began to let my characters tell their stories. In fact, there are things in the book that I don’t agree with. The point was not to persuade the reader but to provoke the reader, to put in these asides, these subtleties, these themes that people don’t think about so much. The different ways in which people very often see the same event is important. What fascinates me in relationships between people is how so much of life is misunderstanding."

Asked about the surface similarities between his character Talcott, a professor of law at an Ivy League school, and himself, Carter is quick to remind his reader that this is a work of fiction, of imagination.

"Talcott is a deeply obsessive person who is constantly interrogating the world," Carter says. "I have a much more laid-back view of the world. And I think I have a greater acceptance of human frailty than Talcott does. It’s very important for me to portray people in ways that they are not a captive of their weaknesses. What is of real interest to me about life— and therefore was of interest to me in writing this novel—is the notion that people succeed not because they undergo fundamental changes of character, but because they transcend their weaknesses."

Continuing in that vein, Carter says, "I’m interested in constancy. I’m interested in how people stay the same. Indeed, I’m interested in the virtue of staying the same sometimes when the world is changing around you. That’s why so much of the book is about love and loyalty," he says. "Talcott’s attitude about love in the book is an old notion in Christianity and Judaism and a lot of traditional societies. It’s the idea that love is an activity, an act of will, rather than a feeling or desire. Talcott and other characters . . . cling to decisions to be loyal or loving, as opposed to simply being moved by what they happen to be feeling. Love is something you decide to do."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, Caifornia.

Some say that the practice of law is the art of compromise. Crafting a successful legal thriller involves a similar process of discovery, rebuttal and the occasional 11th-hour revelation for Mary and Pamela O'Shaughnessy. Eight years ago, the two sisters invented fictitious Lake Tahoe attorney Nina Reilly, who summarily argued her way onto the bestseller lists. They chose the pen name Perri by combining their first names, with a nod to a certain fictional barrister.

"We were inspired by the Perry Mason series to have a lawyer who continued through a lot of different cases," Mary says. "But he never changed; he was suave, urbane, he had his little martinis and his calm relationships that were just suggested and never really fulfilled. Nina's not like that; she's much more a character in transition." Indeed. Between running her business, juggling her love life with Carmel private investigator Paul van Wagoner, keeping her teenage son Bob out of trouble with his cyber-punk girlfriend Nikki and maintaining ties to her ex-husband, San Francisco attorney Jack McIntyre, Nina is one lawyer who has little time for happy hour.

In the new thriller Unfit to Practice, Nina's career takes a dramatic turn when her truck is stolen with three sensitive case files inside. Slowly and with sinister intent, someone begins to leak information from the confidential files to sabotage Nina's cases. When her own clients complain to the California State Bar, Nina faces disbarment and turns to the best defense lawyer she knows, ex-husband Jack. The O'Shaughnessys grew up imagining gripping crime scenarios together as kids in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Pam went on to earn a law degree from Harvard and worked for 16 years as a trial lawyer in private practice in the very Lake Tahoe Starlake Building where Counselor Reilly now resides. Mary took her English degree east to Boston, where she worked on multimedia projects in New York, Washington, D.C., and the Virgin Islands.

Somewhere in mid-career, each reached a personal crossroads. For Pam, raising a toddler sparked dreams of a more creative life. For Mary, the prospect of returning to work with three children under the age of five seemed unimaginable.

Both had been writing independently, pecking away late at night after the kids were in bed. Mary had a book with no plot, Pam a plot with no ending. Why not try collaborating and see what might happen? The idea was terrific, but the collaborative process proved a bit more challenging than it had in childhood, particularly since the two now live in different states. Pam has homes in Hawaii and Lake Tahoe, while Mary lives south of San Francisco. Eight books into their long-distance partnership, they're still working out the kinks of their admittedly idiosyncratic method of writing together.

As a rule, the one who comes up with the premise takes the lead role for that book; the two tend to alternate. The arrangement serves to break creative deadlocks.

"It doesn't mean that we don't each put in equal amounts of work on the draft, we do," says Mary. "But one person has the ultimate say. What that means is they get to do the final draft, so at a certain point you just have to let go, there's no point in arguing." The title comes early on in the story's development, and yes, as a matter of fact, it's getting harder and harder to find suitable three-word legal terms. (Previous titles in the series include Writ of Execution, Invasion of Privacy and Obstruction of Justice.) "We try to choose a legal term that says something about the plot," says Pam. "We seem to be locked into three words, and we're trying to convey some movement, some force of action. It's really difficult." "We look them up to make sure they haven't been used, at least in the last five minutes!" Mary adds.

Next, the sisters draft and submit a detailed outline to their publishers. No problem there? "Just that we throw it out after about the first eight chapters!" quips Pam. In their 1995 debut, Motion to Suppress, they even changed the killer in the fourth draft.

Each writer enjoys the surprises she has come to expect from the other.

"Actually, we're usually very amused," says Mary. "We both love seeing the characters brought to life again. Certainly, the first time you read what the other person has written it's a thrill. Then you begin to look at the nitty gritty and see all of the horrible things they've done, all the mistakes they've made. I think that's just part of the process, to build it up and then tear it down again." The two take turns with the actual writing; generally they will draft eight chapters then pass it to the other to draft the next eight and so on. Pam is the procrastinator, Mary the voice on the phone barking for pages.

"We are real perfectionists and we do have different styles so the book has to go back and forth quite a bit before we're both satisfied," says Mary.

In subsequent drafts (they generally do three complete rewrites before submitting the manuscript to their publisher), the two have learned to correct for each other's blind spots: Pam tends to slip into a passive voice, while Mary's more intricate style and fondness for compound sentences sometimes gets her "buried in language." The O'Shaughnessys say their decision to stay away from graphic sex and violence has been key to the success of the series. "We have some strict standards because we are mothers," says Pam. "We see the books as entertainment, something fun for people, excitement, vicarious adventure. It's important for us to keep the books fun." To keep the writing fun, they've allowed their central character wide berth.

"We're not sure even to this day who that character is in many ways," Mary admits. "She's a little mysterious; she's very impulsive and does things that we did not put in the proposal at any point. She's always changing and always growing, kind of like a real person to us. I'm not sure we always know what she's going to do, and that's always a lot of fun."

Jay Lee MacDonald is a freelance writer in Naples, Florida.

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.