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by Jay MacDonald

Just weeks away from moving into her new dream home, best-selling mystery writer Elizabeth George is having second thoughts about the weather. Said dream home, you see, is situated on Whidbey Island in the shadow of the rainy Cascade Mountains of Washington State. She and her husband Tom have been overseeing its construction for three years from their Seattle condo and are ready to embrace the bucolic country life. Still, George is worried about the notorious Northwest rain—she’s afraid there may not be enough of it.

"I’m a [stormy] weather girl, I love weather," George admits. "The 34 years I spent in Southern California were really torture for me because I love it when it rains. I always have, ever since I was a child, because when it was rainy out, we were allowed to read and when it was sunny out, my mom always wanted us to go out and play. I’m exactly the opposite of most people; I find extended sunshine very, very depressing. It’s very weird."

Her atmospheric preference certainly helps lend a soaked-to-the-skin authenticity to her 14 best-selling British mysteries that feature noble-born Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, his working-class assistant Barbara Havers and his wife, Lady Helen Clyde Lynley, who was shot and killed by a young assailant in last year’s shocker With No One as Witness.

Fans left wondering about Lady Helen’s murderer will be richly rewarded in What Came Before He Shot Her, a prequel of sorts that tracks the events leading up to the crime from the assailant’s point of view.

As the story opens, three siblings—15-year-old Ness Campbell, 11-year-old Joel and seven-year-old Toby—are left to fend for themselves in racially mixed North Kensington when their grandmother dumps them on their decidedly non-parental Aunt Kendra and jets back to Jamaica. When Ness becomes tragically involved with sex and drugs and Toby retreats into an imaginary world of his own, Joel tries desperately to keep his family out of the child welfare system by seeking protection from Blade, a neighborhood drug dealer. Events beyond his control eventually lead him to the Lynley doorstep in Belgravia with a pistol in his hand.

In Joel’s descent, the author explores some heartbreaking truths about disenfranchisement, race, poverty and the plight of children caught in a world they can neither understand nor escape.

"There are so many kids who are basically good people to whom life has dealt a very, very difficult hand of cards that they play as best they can, sometimes with tragic results," she says.

George initially planned to incorporate Joel’s story in With No One as Witness. "My original intention in the previous book was to create something called an hourglass plot, in which two parallel novels run along and then meet in one terrible moment in time, which of course would be Helen Lynley’s death, and then they go on their separate ways again," she explains. "But as I wrote, I began to see that, in order to do the Joel story justice, I was going to end up with a novel that was about 1,500 pages long with a cast of characters like something out of a Russian novel. I thought that what might be more interesting would be to remove the Joel story and then create an entire novel just about this little boy, so that’s what I did."

George is no stranger to working with children, having taught English for 14 years in Southern California. She’s also familiar with the Kensington area of London, where she’s had a flat since 1995. But it took a variety of influences to capture the Anglo-Caribbean patois of the streets.

"I have always watched a great deal of British television, so that was helpful. Also, having read a couple of novels where that was used also helped. The work of Courttia Newland, a young British writer, was extremely helpful to me, because his entire book, The Scholar, is written this way. I was able to examine that and see how he was structuring language," she says.

By now, George is comfortable being known as the most famous British writer who is not British—she was born in Ohio and raised in what is now California’s Silicon Valley. Still, new fans are often shocked to hear her American accent.

"Stylistically, I have always written more like a British or European writer than an American writer," she says. "Setting the books in England gives me much more leeway to do that, I think."

George became an Anglophile at an early age during the British invasion.

"It was right at the time that almost everything associated with pop culture in the United States was British in origin. There was the Beatles and all the groups that followed them, and Mary Quant from London was defining fashion, and motion pictures were introducing us to Michael Caine and Terence Stamp and the Redgraves. My cultural awareness was really informed by things British, so I had a natural interest and inclination toward that part of the world and it just never died."

Although her next novel will return to the Lynley series, George is open to attempting another stand-alone if the opportunity presents itself. "If I did a book similar to this, I would probably choose something tangentially related to another novel, and write that character’s story," she says.

Would this "British" writer ever set a novel in the U.S.?

"I wouldn’t shy away from it if I felt that I had a compelling story to tell in a location that really worked for me," George says. "Location is crucial to my books. I’ve been careful to go to places to make sure that I am going to feel that mystical or visceral connection that allows me to say yes, this is it, this is the place I’m going to write about."

A native of Washington State, Jay MacDonald now makes his home in sunny Austin, Texas.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

T. Jefferson Parker

Interview by Jay MacDonald

by Jay MacDonald

The town of Fallbrook is tucked into the fertile rolling hills north of San Diego, where temperate climate and rich soil combine to form the perfect growing medium for the region’s avocado, citrus and commercial nursery industries. Incongruously, the roar of Army artillery practice from nearby Camp Pendleton routinely punctuates the peacefulness of this otherwise pastoral setting.

Such unlikely contrasts appeal to T. Jefferson Parker, the town’s resident author, whose 14 thrillers have so rarely left the state that one wonders if they’ve been ordered not to by some suspicious investigating officer. The truth is, Jeff Parker (the "T" is silent) is one native Angeleno who finds all the story ideas he can handle in his own hometown.

Witness his latest thriller, Storm Runners, at once a revenge plot, redemption tale and love story that features the very sort of outrageous contrasts that tempt and tease readers before ultimately reeling them in.

Here’s the back story: Matt Stromsoe and Mike Tavarez are buddies at Santa Ana High, the former a drum major, the latter a marching band member. They part ways at graduation—Stromsoe becomes a San Diego sheriff’s deputy, Tavarez heads east to Harvard, then becomes a chieftain in the Mexican mafia. When Stromsoe directs a manhunt that captures Tavarez but accidentally kills his girlfriend, the kingpin retaliates with a car bomb meant for Matt that instead kills his wife and son. Severely disabled in the blast, Matt descends into self-pity and drink.

Two years later, a buddy pulls Matt back from the brink and offers him a job with his private security firm. Matt’s first assignment: protect Frankie Hatfield, a television meteorologist who is being stalked by a crazed fan. The closer Matt grows to Frankie, the more he suspects that her off-hours tinkering with a formula her eccentric ancestor Charles Hatfield used to make rain may be putting her life in danger.

Farfetched? Actually, Storm Runners is based on true events. As they say: only in California.

"Charles Hatfield is a real guy. Isn’t that amazing?" Parker says. "I’ve known about him for a while. The next village over, Bonsall, is where Hatfield had his secret lab. It’s real easy for me to sit here from a few miles away and go, wow, what if it’s still there, buried down in some old oak trees and grown over with wild cucumber?"

Could the garage scientist actually make it rain?

"Yeah! He was great at it!" Parker says. " The story in the book where he floods San Diego and then has to flee town because they want to hang him instead of pay him, that’s a true story right out of the history books. Of course, for every stupendous rainmaking success that Charles had, he would have a resounding failure also, so the rational scientific community never considered him as anything more than fraudulently lucky. But if you look at his successes, they really were spectacular."

OK, perhaps we’ll accept a beautiful modern-day rainmaker. But a Harvard-educated drug lord?

"The Harvard guy is real, too," Parker chuckles. "Nobody would believe that; I wouldn’t even write that character if, in fact, there hadn’t been a guy doing that right around the corner from where I grew up. He went to Harvard and robbed liquor stores on weekends. Sometimes when you get a little nugget of history or fact underneath you, you feel emboldened to exaggerate it or make it bigger."

Parker often sprinkles deft, defining touches throughout his breakneck tales that keep the characters grounded. In Storm Runners, it’s the Painted Lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui), one of which makes a lovely touchdown on a dead man’s shoe.

"Those are a real phenomenon here, and they’re spectacular and beautiful. It just seemed like a natural thing for the story because I wanted to portray Stromsoe’s re-entry into the world as a return to Eden, almost an idyllic place where it’s fragrant and peaceful. It’s a real starting-over story, and putting in butterflies just seemed a nice touch."

Growing up in suburban Tustin, Parker always had a taste for truths that were stranger than fiction, and nurtured it, after graduating in English from the University of California-Irvine, by signing on as a newspaper reporter in Orange County.

" I was a boyhood admirer of the Guinness Book of World Records, those weird things like the bearded woman and the fattest man," he admits. "I love those obscure facts that are so outlandish you really can’t believe them, but you have to."

After immersing himself in classic L.A. noir fiction, from Raymond Chandler to James Ellroy, Parker set out to reinvent the genre from the sunny, suburban perspective of the O.C. The result was his 1985 debut hit, Laguna Heat.

" I very purposefully tried to avoid all things that had gone before," he says. "It wasn’t a dark, moody, drinking L.A. noir story at all; it was set in Laguna Beach, for crying out loud, with eucalyptus trees and paintings and artists and beautiful waves. Even at that age, I knew you couldn’t put the gumshoe in the phone booth; it just doesn’t work anymore."

Along with a handful of West Coast contemporaries, including Don Winslow and Kem Nunn, Parker continues to refine and redefine what L.A. crime fiction can be.

"I like and respect the mystery genre very much, but I think sometimes you can find yourself handcuffed by convention a little bit if you don’t try to stretch those boundaries, and sometimes break them," he says.

"My last book, The Fallen, is completely noir-free; it’s bright and optimistic and the main character has not an ounce of darkness in him. And I think that’s a legitimate way to look at the world and a legitimate way to write a novel. If at some point during the writing of the book it becomes clear to me that I’m going to have to ignore certain conventions, I’m going to do it, because the book is more important than the genre."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

The town of Fallbrook is tucked into the fertile rolling hills north of San Diego, where temperate climate and rich soil combine to form the perfect growing medium for the region's avocado, citrus and commercial nursery industries. Incongruously, the roar of Army artillery practice…

Cozy Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Cozy Mystery

Lisa Lutz

Interview by Iris Blasi

by Iris Blasi

Lisa Lutz never anticipated writing a book. An aspiring screenwriter, she began the script for a mob farce in 1991 at age 21, and quit her day job the moment Hollywood producers came calling. But it was more than a decade and 25 revisions later that the film, Plan B, starring Diane Keaton, Paul Sorvino and Natasha Lyonne, was actually made. Following a West Coast premiere set for September 11, 2001, the movie had a week-long limited release after which with the exception of a few small film festivals it was rarely shown in the United States.

But that's OK, because Lutz herself gives two thumbs down to the final product. "I don't recommend anyone watching the version that is out right now," she says. "I enjoyed to an extent how funny and silly it was. But [for this] to be my life's work? That felt so insane." Her dream of writing a Hollywood movie had been realized, but Lutz was smarting from her bumpy road to the big screen. "Nothing went well," she says of the process. "We started to call the production 'the curse of Plan B.' " Somewhere around rewrite number six, the producers decided to cut a secondary character on which a major plot point hung, and Lutz's story caved in on itself. The finale of the writing process was a fax from the producers demanding that a lead character die by being eaten by an alligator. Lutz made the change, but was distraught that the story was no longer hers. "It's really hard to have something you worked that hard on be massacred," she says.

Soured on Tinseltown, Lutz vowed never to write a script again, instead holing up in a relative's 200-year-old house in upstate New York in the dead of winter in 2004. Six months later, she emerged from hibernation with a first draft of what was to become her first novel.

"I think I wrote a better novel than I ever wrote a screenplay," she says. The first in a planned series, The Spellman Files tells the story of Isabelle Spellman, a tough-talking 28-year-old (described by another character as "Dirty Harry meets Nancy Drew") who works for her eccentric family's P.I. business. Investigating others is their formal objective, but the family including alcoholic gambler Uncle Ray and Izzy's 14-year-old sister Rae (who is known to snap incriminating photos of family members to use as blackmail) regularly probe each other's lives as well. This comes to a head when Izzy starts dating nice-guy dentist Daniel and can't go on a date without turning around to find her mother hot on her tail.

"The truth was, I never doubted for a moment that my parents loved me," Izzy says of this parental over-involvement. "But love in my family has a bite to it and sometimes you get tired of icing all those tooth marks." To save her sanity, Izzy wants out of the P.I. dynasty. Her parents agree to let her go, as long as she completes a final assignment. As Izzy tries to solve the near-impossible 12-year-old missing persons case, Rae suddenly disappears, leading Izzy to reevaluate her priorities and put her skills to the ultimate test: finding her little sister.

Lutz didn't have to look far for research. While writing Plan B, she did a two-year stint working for a private investigator, and the tricks of the trade she picked up (such as smashing the taillights of car you're following to make it easier to spot a tactic Izzy employs on a regular basis) populate the novel. Though these details are drawn from real life, Lutz is adamant that her family is nothing like the meddlesome Spellmans. And as for Izzy? "Izzy has my sense of humor, because I don't think I could write in a totally different sense of humor," Lutz says. "But I'm no taillight-smashing vandal."

The Spellman Files has been optioned by Paramount, but Lutz swears she won't play a major role in the film's production. Instead, she's wrapping up the Spellman sequel, planning her next novel, thinking about writing a play and reflecting on the lessons she learned from her ill-fated Hollywood foray.

"People think you can get what you want if you just keep trying. But the moment I tried something different and approached it from a different way, I got what I wanted," she says of her open-mindedness about writing form.

Then she pauses for a moment. "I think it's luck, too," she says. "I do think I got very lucky this time around."

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

David Baldacci

Interview by Eve Zibart

by Eve Zibart

This is something all Southern writers know: Truth makes the best fiction (and not infrequently, vice versa). With more than 50 million copies of his books in print, and seven screenplays, including the Clint Eastwood/Gene Hackman film Absolute Power, under his belt, Virginia-born novelist and screenwriter David Baldacci is no exception. He still looks like a Richmond kid, prone to khakis and loafers and collared shirts, and his office in the Washington suburbs recalls a Virginia gentleman's library, complete with leather couch and armchairs—except that nearby building signs read Northrop Grumman and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

Perhaps that's part of the reason that the details of Baldacci's political thrillers, featuring agents of the FBI, CIA, DEA, Secret Service and so on, are so accurate that increasingly higher-up officials are willing to talk to him. His novels based on true crimes, like the Bill Clinton favorite Simple Truth, have a human impetus more moving than mere righteous indignation.

Even when his plots are not inspired by real events, the procedures, the prejudices, the in-fighting and the more literal hand-to-hand fighting are meticulously researched and reported. And when Baldacci can throw in a famous puzzle, a musical code, a prison-camp escape tunnel and a real-life secret government installation, not to mention a childhood trauma or two, he has a story recipe that's hard to top.

This year, however, Baldacci will try to top himself. Instead of coming out with his annual fall thriller, he's publishing two—Simple Genius, the third adventure of former Secret Service agents-turned-private eyes Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, and Stone Cold, a follow-up to 2005's Camel Club. He is also re-releasing the most Southern novel in his repertory, and the book closest to his heart: Wish You Well, a semi-autobiographical reflection on his family history. Simple Genius and Wish You Well are out this month; Stone Cold, already into second draft, will be published in the fall.

Baldacci has always been a writer, or at least a talker, which is how all storytellers start. He says he talked so much as a kid that finally, when he was eight or nine years old, "my mother got me a book with blank pages to write on, mostly to keep me quiet." But, like most Southern-bred writers, Baldacci originally set out to write short stories. "It's the characters," he says, citing the quality of the characters in what might be called the Southern canon: To Kill a Mockingbird, Walker Percy's Lancelot, the stories of Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty and Truman Capote. "I really loved them. I still prefer my books to be people-driven rather than plot-driven."

As it transpired, Baldacci was better suited to clarity than simile. He was writing briefs (after graduating from the University of Virginia Law School, he worked as a litigator in a prominent Washington firm) and trying to write short stories at night, when he gradually realized he had a stronger narrative drive.

"I like economy in language; it makes it stronger," Baldacci says. "There's much to be said for narrative flow—saying something decisive in a paragraph instead of two pages. I love to edit; if I can find a section of a [para]graph that's not necessary, I'm delighted." Having said that, he wryly admits that the experience of turning in a screenplay and having the director "challenge every word" can really "focus one's attention."

He works out much of the story in his head before writing the first draft on a computer, and then edits in longhand. He keeps notebooks with details and "backstories," but although he generally has a character's future, and past, sketched out, things occasionally take an unexpected turn. "Spontaneity is not a bad thing," he says. "You shouldn't be afraid to go off the road, because if you surprise yourself, you'll surprise the reader."

Simple Genius involves ciphers, computers, childhood traumas and the CIA, among other elements. Woven through the evolving relationship between King and Maxwell are forays into classical codes and Internet encryption (factual), Virginia colonial history (slightly fictionalized) and modern-day government operations at Camp Peary, a CIA "farm" on the York River. While the story and characters that Baldacci places at the installation are entirely fictional, the camp itself is not, although "if you call the CIA and ask them about Camp Peary, they don't admit that it exists."

To research it, Baldacci went along the river as close to the station as he could, and talked to locals who have lived with its various agencies (it started out as a Navy base) all their lives. One of the most chilling sentences in the book has to do with the unidentified jets that land there: A small-town newspaper editor tells King and Maxwell, "I knew something was up before Gulf One and Afghanistan and Iraq started because that damn runway at Peary looked like Chicago's O'Hare what with all the traffic going in." That's precisely what a local resident told Baldacci—a quote not only stranger but stronger than fiction.

Baldacci's villains are not the only ones playing games. His books are filled with literary allusions, historical "borrowings," name games, etc. Simple Genius includes a reprint of the famous Beale Cypher, only one page of which has ever been deciphered—using the Declaration of Independence as the key—and which allegedly leads to a vast treasure buried in Tidewater Virginia. (Baldacci, whose family owns a country place in Bedford County, says he grew up with treasure hunters digging holes all around the area.) And the new edition of Wish You Well has an appendix encouraging readers to begin to track their own family histories.

Baldacci has another quintessential trait of the Southern writer: As a man who loves to read, he wants others to love reading, and most of the programs funded by his Wish You Well Foundation are literacy campaigns. He's concerned about a general disappearance of literacy tools—not only reading, but writing, which is the gateway to creativity. "I think it's great that the SATs finally include an essay, but did you realize that 80 percent of students wrote their essays in block letters?

They don't even teach writing in schools anymore." Among the programs Baldacci has created is "Feeding Body and Mind," which partners with America's Second Harvest food banks to provide used or new books along with the meals. So far, they have distributed more than 40,000 volumes. If you're interested in contributing, you can find out more at davidbaldacci.com, which also lists Baldacci's reading schedule.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Janet Evanovich

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

Even after 12 installments, readers can’t get enough of Janet Evanovich’s best-selling Stephanie Plum novels. Starting with 1994’s One for the Money, the series injected a healthy dose of humor into the mystery genre and turned the smart-alecky but tough New Jersey bounty hunter into one of fiction’s most memorable characters. Putting her likeable heroine into outrageous situations with hilarious sidekicks (not to mention two sexy love interests) proved to be a winning formula for Evanovich, who is also the author of a NASCAR-themed series set in Miami and three other co-written series. On June 19, Evanovich serves up Lean Mean Thirteen, which finds Stephanie a suspect in the disappearance of her ex-husband, Dickie. We asked Evanovich a few questions about the new book, her work and what really motivates her to write.

Stephanie has bad luck with cars. Have you ever had a car of your own burst into flames? Do any cars bite the big one in the new book?
I’ve never had a car burst into flames, but my daughter has at one time or another driven most of Stephanie’s cars. She doesn’t so much destroy them, as they die their own natural death. Of course cars bite the big one in Thirteen! Will

Stephanie ever choose between the two men in her life? And do fans seem to want her with Ranger or Morelli?
The fans run 50/50 in the Morelli versus Ranger debate. Many don’t want to choose, and I can’t say I blame them. Eventually Stephanie will choose, but not until the end of the series.

Stephanie wouldn’t be caught dead: a) with flat bangs b) at the mall without makeup c) eating pizza without beer d) leaving the house unarmed e) all of the above
A, B and C. Stephanie leaves the house unarmed all the time, not counting her can of hairspray.

Like James Patterson, you take a very practical, businesslike approach to your writing you’ve even referred to your work as carrying the Evanovich brand. Do you get impatient with writers who talk about muses, writer’s block and the like?
I have muses. They just come in the form of birthday cake and the occasional tankard of beer.

Though you write the Plum series solo, you work on three other series with co-authors. What’s it like writing with someone else?
The co-authored books add variety to my life. I don’t look for a co-author who can clone me, but rather someone who can live with the Evanovich promise (easy to read, entertaining, feel good, happy ending).

Do you do any research for your writing?
I do a lot of research when I’m starting a new series. For instance, I had to attend a lot of NASCAR races for the Metro series. Sort of self-serving since I’m a NASCAR addict.

Your tours draw huge crowds. What’s the craziest thing that’s ever happened to you at a book signing?
That’s hard to say. Crazy is pretty much the norm.

How do you unwind?
Unwind? I’m afraid if I ever unwound I wouldn’t be able to wind again.

Any plans for a Stephanie Plum perfume or line of lingerie?
A perfume that smells like pineapple upside-down cake. I like that idea!

What books are you taking with you on vacation this year?
Vacation???!!! There’s no time for vacationing this year. After Thirteen comes out I have to get ready for the No Chance (co-authored with Stephen Cannell) tour and then my daughter is getting married (hallelujah!) and early next year Plum Lucky (St. Patrick’s Day holiday novella) comes out. The year is packed.

Even after 12 installments, readers can't get enough of Janet Evanovich's best-selling Stephanie Plum novels. Starting with 1994's One for the Money, the series injected a healthy dose of humor into the mystery genre and turned the smart-alecky but tough New Jersey bounty hunter…

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Chelsea Cain

Interview by Jay MacDonald

by Jay MacDonald

There is absolutely nothing about Chelsea Cain to remotely suggest that she had the year’s scariest novel inside her. The daughter of hippies who spent her formative years in an Iowa commune, Cain’s published work to date consists of an arch Nancy Drew parody (Confessions of a Teen Sleuth), a hippie-child anthology (Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture), a memoir of a road trip with her dying mother (Dharma Girl), a folk art how-to (Hippie Handbook) and a send-up of self-help for superheroes (Does This Cape Make Me Look Fat?). At 35, Cain is a seemingly well-adjusted Portland, Oregon, wife and new mother whose humorous weekly column in the Oregonian shows nary a hint of the chill factor behind her blue eyes.

How did a peace-and-love child come to unleash the full-on, visceral assault to be found in her new thriller, Heartsick?

Nightmares, gentle reader, nightmares.

But before we explore Cain’s psyche, you need to meet Gretchen Lowell, who, should this series take off as expected, may one day join Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter in our collective anxiety closet.

As Heartsick opens, the lovely Gretchen is strategically pounding nails into the chest of wide-awake-but-chemically-immobilized Portland Police Detective Archie Sheridan, whose task force has been on the trail of a serial killer for the past decade. He never expected his search would lead to the beautiful blond psychologist who only recently volunteered her services to the cause, only to abduct him. Then again, Gretchen is full of surprises, mostly of the excruciatingly painful sort. During their intimate week together, she uses a variety of tools to probe Archie’s pain threshold, ultimately bringing him to the brink of death before calling 911, saving his life but forfeiting her freedom. Someone please pull this girl’s Home Depot card!

Flash forward two years. The ordeal has left Archie a shell of a man with a raging Vicodin habit who visits Gretchen in prison weekly to learn the burial sites of her 200-plus victims. Only Archie knows the real reason for his visits: He can’t quit her. When teenage girls start disappearing, Archie and the task force are called in to hunt down the newly dubbed After-School Killer. The Portland Herald assigns pink-haired punk reporter Susan Ward to shadow Archie for a behind-the-scenes series. As the search continues, Susan’s own secret past places her in the killer’s path, and Archie, sensing a certain Gretchen-ness in the latest carnage, makes the kind of bone-chilling discovery that will have readers sleeping with the lights on.

Despite a quirky pace and a tendency to press the plausible, Heartsick may be the scariest psycho killer ride since Silence of the Lambs. The squeamish should definitely look elsewhere (perhaps a nice how-to book).

As a pre-teen growing up in Bellingham, Washington, Cain was terrified by news accounts of West Coast psycho killers. "We had Ted Bundy, the Hillside Strangler, the Green River Killer—it seemed like there were serial killers everywhere as a kid," she recalls.

Years later, Cain was pregnant with her first child and overindulging on rainy BBC America mysteries when she channel-surfed upon a Larry King segment with members of the Green River task force. She recognized the guests from newspaper accounts she’d read as a kid, and was fascinated by footage of them interacting with confessed Green River Killer Gary Ridgway.

"They would go on these weird field trips together, looking for bodies of his victims, and they had this very congenial relationship with him. They just seemed like friends; they had known him for so long because he had been a suspect for much of the life of the case," she says.

With prenatal time on her hands ("I couldn’t drink," she quips), Cain decided to explore her darkest fears as a child, and perhaps her fears for her daughter as well.

" Didn’t Mary Shelley write Frankenstein when she was pregnant?" she asks. "Maybe there is something to that, a fascination with death and life. Pregnancy is violent; in a way, it’s its own little torture. Maybe that’s where the fascination with the body in Heartsick comes from."

As luck would have it, Cain had recently joined a weekly writing workshop hosted by an author friend who is no stranger to graphic detail: Chuck Palahniuk. Did the best-selling author of Fight Club, Haunted and Rant help crank up the gore quotient of Heartsick?

"Oh, hugely," Cain admits. "Chuck is a big proponent of unpacking—really anything, but especially anything that’s visceral. I remember reading a passage aloud where they find the first girl’s body on the beach and Chuck was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, I want to see what that girl looks like.’ And there’s something important in that, to understand the violence of that."

Choosing a female serial killer vastly opened up the psychological possibilities of the series—watch for Sweetheart and Heartbreaker in the next two years.

"That automatically added this sexual tension on top of it," Cain admits. "When women kill, we always want an explanation. We usually want to blame it on a boyfriend or a husband or a father; there’s got to be a guy in her past that screwed her up enough. But when men kill, we don’t necessarily feel this need to explain it. Women generally kill their babies or they kill their family members and they use poison or suffocation. It’s very quiet, it’s premeditated and it’s very different from the way men kill. I was interested in exploring a woman who kills like a man."

Though Cain admits she’s "a little nervous" about attracting an unstable fan or two with her graphic content, she defends her decision to "unpack" her childhood baggage.

" I don’t think it’s gratuitous. I think it’s a violent book, but in order to understand Archie and Gretchen’s relationship, which drives the whole narrative, you have to understand what he went through. Society is filled with violence. To point at a book and start crying about how that is where the problem is, that’s pretty naïve."

Jay MacDonald always wears his safety goggles when operating machinery.

There is absolutely nothing about Chelsea Cain to remotely suggest that she had the year's scariest novel inside her. The daughter of hippies who spent her formative years in an Iowa commune, Cain's published work to date consists of an arch Nancy Drew parody (Confessions…

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

David Baldacci

Interview by Karen Holt

by Karen Holt

David Baldacci's new book, The Whole Truth, boasts everything that has landed his last 14 thrillers on national bestseller lists: the compelling villains, the fearless hero, the suspense and all those delicious twists. In other words—it's a really fun read. But Baldacci hopes readers will get more out of it than just a good time. "Maybe with this book, people will sit up and say, 'Gee that could happen. And we need to make sure that it doesn't happen,'" he says.

The Whole Truth is about the Big Lie, and how the Internet has made it possible for disinformation to sound so convincing and to spread so fast that facts become irrelevant. "It's ironic. I think we have less truth today than we had 50 yeas ago," he says, adding, "You can go into a chat room and throw out percentages and figures and they can be a total lie, but people believe them." In Baldacci's new book, Nicholas Creel, the head of the world's largest defense contractor, hires a "perception management" company—the so-called PMers don't just spin facts, they make stuff up—to re-ignite Cold War fears about the Red Menace, driving nations toward the edge of WWIII. It's no coincidence that the plot calls to mind recent concerns about real-life Russian President Vladimir Putin. While PMers trade in lies, "Their targets are picked really well; it's easy to have a negative view of Russia," says Baldacci.

The disinformation campaign that propels The Whole Truth begins with the release of a grainy amateur video showing a Russian man recounting the horrors that he and his countrymen are suffering at the hands of the Secret Russian Federation police. Never mind that the man is an actor. The whole world buys the lie—and nations buy trillions of dollars worth of Creel's weapons. The scenario is not far-fetched, insists Baldacci, who says he got the idea for the book by talking to real people in the perception management business. Since publishing his blockbuster debut novel, Absolute Power, 12 years ago, the author has prided himself on having sources that lend his stories of government corruption and military intrigue authenticity. The 47-year-old Virginia native, who spent nine years as a lawyer in Washington, D.C., before giving up law to write full time, works out of an office in Northern Virginia where his neighbors include the Department of Homeland Security, defense giant Lockheed Martin and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Could the company he keeps be making him paranoid? "I keep my shades drawn and I never say anything over the phone I wouldn't want others to know," Baldacci says. He's chuckling, but it's hard to tell if he's entirely joking. "I don't know if I am or not," he admits.

In The Whole Truth, Shaw, a guy for whom beating up thugs and terrorists is all in a day's work, fights to reveal the truth. But in real life, brains, not brawn, may the best defense against the Big Lie. Disinformation won't be as effective, Baldacci says, if people start reading widely and reaching their own—well-informed—conclusions. "I want people to be curious again. I get tired of listening to people whose opinions are verbatim what they hear on Rush Limbaugh or what they hear on 'The Daily Show,'" he says. Baldacci is doing more than just complaining about the decline in reading. In 1999 he founded the Wish You Well Foundation to support literacy programs. Two years ago the foundation partnered with the hunger-relief organization America's Second Harvest to establish the Feeding Body and Mind (feedingbodyandmind.com) initiative. When Baldacci makes a store appearance, readers bring books to donate, which are then taken to local food banks and distributed to poor families. He's planning to recruit other authors into the program when he speaks in July at Thrillerfest in New York, where the International Thriller Writers Association is giving him its Silver Bullet Award. In the meantime, Baldacci is already well into his next book, a Camel Club thriller that picks up where Oliver Stone's story left off in Stone Cold. The as-yet-untitled book is due out in November.

He's also closely watching the presidential race. Baldacci, who describes himself as an independent, worries the public excitement generated by the candidates won't last once the contest is over. "It's easy to listen to a speech for 10 minutes," he says. "But come January, when we have a new president and the really hard decisions are being made, I'm afraid our citizens are going to check out again."

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Tom Rob Smith

Interview by Jay MacDonald

by Jay MacDonald

Leo Demidov's personal hell has truly been paved with the best of intentions. The Soviet war hero and rising star within Stalin's State Security force has ordered the execution of thousands of his countrymen, or worse, dispatched them to the infamous gulags, all in service to the greater good of communism. But when he obediently dismisses the brutal 1953 murder and evisceration of a colleague's young son as nothing more than an accident, the narrow path of lies on which his career is founded suddenly veers into a nightmarish landscape of his own worst fears. The child is, in fact, a victim of an evil the Soviet state has never seen before: a serial killer.

Welcome to Child 44, a grisly and gripping redemption tale constructed by 28-year-old British newcomer Tom Rob Smith that puts the screws to your personal sense of morality. Would you betray your spouse to save yourself or your parents? Could you conduct torture, or endure it? Could you execute your own sibling? These are just a few of the dark choices Leo must face in this bone-chilling, frostbitten thriller.

"It's easy in most of today's societies to be a good person because, fundamentally, the societies are good; we're liberal, we're tolerant, we're about people achieving what they want to achieve in a sweeping sense," Smith says. "But when your society is asking these terrible things of you, how easy is it to buck it? How easy is it to shrug that off, and how easy do you get caught up in that?"

Initially at least, readers may be more repulsed by than attracted to Leo. He is, after all, a state-employed grim reaper whose parents and wife Raisa live comfortably because of the terrible things he does to real and rumored dissidents alike. But when Vasili, Leo's scheming subordinate, plants doubts about Leo within the paranoid hierarchy, Leo and Raisa find themselves exiled to the boondocks.

That's where Leo begins putting together the missing-children puzzle pieces, an unauthorized activity that unintentionally results in a one-way trip to the gulags for some 200 suspected homosexuals. It also makes Leo and Raisa fugitives from Vasili, now Leo's superior, who seeks to crush the pair before they can expose crimes that have already been officially paid for by such convenient scapegoats as mental patients and gays.

"Leo is the kind of character you see in Conrad a lot, which is this idealism gone wrong," says Smith. "He is someone who is fundamentally a good person, but in the attempt to arrest someone who is genuinely guilty, he is then persecuted for it. It's an interesting flip for me, but then it's an interesting redemption for him."

Dark secrets from Leo's past lead to a surprising and satisfying conclusion. Smith is already hard at work on a sequel, The Secret Speech, which picks up Leo's story three years later when thousands of those whose lives Leo ruined are released from the gulags.

What prompted Smith to set a serial killer thriller within one of the world's most repressive regimes? History, actually. The London-based, Cambridge-educated television screenwriter and editor was working on a screen adaptation of "Somewhere the Shadow," a short story by U.K. science fiction writer Jeff Noon (Vurt; Pollen) when he happened upon the true-crime case of Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo.

"He was what were called 'pushers' whose job was basically to go and beg a factory to deliver whatever it had promised to deliver, because everyone was behind on these deliveries. So he had this job going up and down the country by rail, which enabled him to kill over a wide distance," he says.

Smith dove into researching the Soviet Union, reading everything from Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago to yes, even Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park.

"My first thought was that this would make a great movie, so I wrote a 12-page outline and pitched it to my film agent," says Smith. "He said, 'Well, it's Stalinist Russia, it's period, it's going to cost $80-$100 million to produce and there are only like three directors in the world who can get this off the ground. You're an unknown writer; you're shooting for the moon.' Instead, he suggested that I should write it as a book."

Smith credits Child 44's breathless pace to his screenwriting background. "In screenwriting, you think about set pieces a lot. Movie directors are very ruthless about making sure that things happen at the right point and that things are always happening; you can't have, say, 10 dull minutes. That's something that I took from screenwriting and applied to this."

That said, Smith loved the freedom of prose. "There are things in this book that I could never have done in a movie script," he admits. "One of the things I love about writing prose is that you can bring peripheral characters absolutely to the forefront of the action in two paragraphs and really explore them in a way that is very difficult to do in movies."

Although readers should brace themselves for a few uncomfortable scenes of violence and torture in Child 44, most of the horrors occur in our heads, not on the page, as Smith exposes the agonizing paranoia of the Stalinist era.

Objections to the book's violence "surprise me slightly, not in the sense that I thought it was going to be an easy read, but I'm not really interested in gore," he says. "It's like describing sex in a book; it's very difficult because it just becomes almost anatomical and slightly uninteresting. I'm interested in the emotional side of things."

About that expensive movie version: Child 44 has been optioned by one of those three green-light directors, Ridley Scott of Blade Runner, Alien and Gladiator fame. Will Smith be writing the screenplay? "

No. I spent two-and-a-half years playing on the strengths of this as a book. I didn't really feel like I was the person to then rediscover it as a movie. I thought, someone needs to come at this fresh."

Jay MacDonald writes from snow-free Austin.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Janet Evanovich

Interview by Karen Holt

by Karen Holt

Over the 14 years since she introduced readers to her fictional alter-ego, bounty-hunter Stephanie Plum, Janet Evanovich has gone from obscure romance novelist to international superstar, a writer whose professional concerns include the logistics of keeping 5,000 snapshot-hungry fans moving through a line and preventing her hand from swelling up during marathon autograph signings.

Meanwhile, Stephanie’s life, it is fair to say, has changed less dramatically. "She’s a little bit better bounty hunter and I think she has a better idea of who she is," says Evanovich, speaking by phone from her winter home in Naples, Florida (she migrates north to New Hampshire in the late spring). "She knows that she’s indecisive. She knows she’s in love with two men. She knows that she doesn’t have the world’s best job and she isn’t really great at it."

Out this month, the latest in the series of Plum mysteries, Fearless Fourteen, finds Stephanie still working for her cousin Vinnie, this time in a case involving a $9 million bank robbery committed by a relative of her sometimes-boyfriend Morelli. Working hard to survive in a world filled with gun-toting criminals and eccentric losers, she seems to have little in common with her famous creator. Still, former Jersey girl Evanovich insists, "There is a lot of me in Stephanie."

Take, for instance, their shared weakness for birthday cake. As Fearless opens, Stephanie confesses, "I used to have a birthday cake in the freezer for emergencies, but I ate it. Truth is, I would dearly love to be a domestic goddess, but the birthday cake keeps getting eaten."

On the day of our interview, Evanovich has just celebrated her 65th birthday, an occasion that was to have included a champagne cruise with her family on their 22-foot Grady-White boat. But by the time they hit the water, Evanovich was too nauseous from an over-consumption of cake to face the bubbly. And she wasn’t using her big day as an excuse. "I’ve been known to go to the supermarket and kind of cruise for abandoned birthday cakes," she says, noting that you can get them for half-off.

Evanovich says she’s found that career success has had surprisingly little to do with her personal life. "I’m still the wife and the mother," says Evanovich, whose husband, son, daughter and son-in-law all play various roles in her career. "I’m still the creative person that I always was. On the outside, what that money has done is made it easier for me to be that person, because I can have someone come into my house to clean twice a week. Or because I can live anywhere I want."

She adds that celebrity didn’t help her avoid gaining 30 pounds while writing Fearless. She ate her way through the novel and has her heroine do the same. Though, despite the many references to junk food spread throughout the book, Stephanie doesn’t gain weight. She doesn’t age either, another advantage of fiction over real life.

With the book behind her, Evanovich says, "I am now in full weight-loss mode. I’m on Atkins. The birthday cake just finished me off." She’s about to embark on a book tour that will include media appearances and meeting thousands of readers in person. But she says that’s not why she wants to shed the pounds. "If I went on the ‘Today’ show and I weighed 170, I don’t think anybody would really care," she says. "For myself personally I don’t feel good at that weight."

Like Stephanie, Evanovich can be refreshingly frank about her vulnerabilities. "Five years ago, I had a facelift. I didn’t have that facelift because I wanted to look good on the ‘Today’ show," she says. "I had it because every time I looked in the mirror, I had no relationship with that woman. I wake up every morning and I think I’m 32."

Evanovich’s work goes beyond the Plum mysteries, of course. There are the Alex Barnaby NASCAR novels, the co-authored romantic suspense novels and the nonfiction book, How I Write. In addition, romances she wrote years ago are in the process of being re-released.

Still, the sexy, struggling bounty hunter remains her signature character. And Evanovich plans to keep her on the job for a long time. "I really have no intention of stopping. And I don’t have to. Why? Because I’m only 32."

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Elmore Leonard

Interview by Jay MacDonald

by Jay MacDonald

Among crime novelists past and present, Elmore Leonard is a prime number, a talent so simple and elemental that it refuses to be divided by comparison to others. Whether he’s hanging with mobsters in Miami Beach, dreamers in Detroit or hustlers in Hollywood, his every dark comedy really takes place in Leonard Land, a closed universe populated by lovable cons, ex-cons and soon-to-be-cons whose dialogue is so spot-on that you hear it rather than read it. The one character you’ll never find in Leonard Land is the author himself. Leonard works hard to stay out of the frame and allow his characters to take over, moving and grooving to their own unpredictable beat.

“When I start a book, I never know how it’s going to end. I never know what’s going to happen,” Leonard admits. “I don’t have a computer. I write in longhand and then I put it on a typewriter, then I rewrite that, and rewrite it and rewrite it. It takes about four pages to get one clean page. I just start writing and keep going.”

The one thing Leonard won’t tolerate is fancy prose. As he states in his 10 Rules of Writing: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

At 83, with 30 novels to his credit in a career that spans more than half a century, Leonard remains up to his splendid tricks. In his latest, Road Dogs, he takes characters from three previous novels and combines them into a whole that is greater—and funnier—than the sum of its parts. Road Dogs also serves as something of a Leonard Land retrospective, with shout-outs to everyone from the hanging judge in Maximum Bob to Miami Beach bookie Harry Arno in Pronto to the otherworldly possibilities of Touch.

The “road dogs” in question are Jack Foley, the charming bank robber played to perfection by George Clooney in the film version of Out of Sight, and his prison wingman Cundo Rey, the millionaire Cuban hustler/go-go dancing Cat Prince from LaBrava. Both are facing years behind bars in Florida’s Glades Correctional until Cundo secures the services of a hot young female attorney. She manages to spring Jack first, with Cundo’s release to follow in two weeks.

Since Cundo paid Jack’s $30,000 legal fees, Foley agrees to crash at one of his oceanfront homes in Venice, California, and keep an eye on Dawn Navarro, the professional psychic from Riding the Rap, who has been Cundo’s lady in waiting for seven years. It takes little effort for Dawn to seduce Jack, but he’s cautious when she attempts to enlist him in a scheme to steal Cundo’s off-the-books fortune. The plot starts perking when Cundo arrives home a day early, throwing the dynamics between the three into the spin cycle.

Leonard has occasionally revisited characters in the past, including Raylin Givens (Rum Punch) and Harry Arno (Pronto) in Riding the Rap and Chili Palmer (Get Shorty) in Be Cool.

“I had no reservations bringing back these three characters. I felt that I hadn’t done quite enough with them,” he says. “I was anxious to use them because I know them. They have personalities of their own and I could make them talk, that’s the main thing.”

But he hit a small snag when it came to Cundo Rey. “I wanted to use him, so I had to open LaBrava to see what happened to him and I went, oh God, he’s dead!” Leonard chuckles. “He’s not pronounced dead, but Joe LaBrava shoots him in the chest three times. So I just have the emergency squad pick him up and say, ‘Hey, he’s still breathing!’ That took care of that.”

Then there was the Clooney factor. Since the success of Steven Soderbergh’s film version of Out of Sight, it’s become virtually impossible to separate Foley from Clooney—not that Leonard minds. “I loved the casting. In fact, I wondered, can I do another Foley picturing Clooney? And I had no problem,” he says.

It may prove a bigger obstacle should a film version of Road Dogs come up for discussion, as it almost certainly will. “Universal owns those characters now, so we either have to sell this to them or get an agreement that allows us to go somewhere else. And they don’t want to do that; they don’t like things to slip out of their hands,” the author says.

Leonard got his start, and perhaps his fascination for fringe dwellers, in the 1950s, writing Westerns on the side while holding down a “real” job in advertising. When the market for Westerns dried up, he switched to crime. “I would read John D. MacDonald’s stories in Cosmopolitan and different places and think, that’s what I should be doing,” he recalls. His early attempts fell somewhere between the giants of the genre.

“The book that changed my style somewhat was The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George Higgins. I think that’s the best crime book ever written. It’s about bank robbers and the guy who supplies clean guns for every job,” Leonard says. “What I learned is, I was already using a lot of dialogue, moving the story with dialogue, but I wasn’t getting into scenes as quickly. I was setting up scenes and then getting the characters talking, instead of getting them talking first. [Afterward] editors would complain, ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, these two people are talking,’ and I would say, just stay with it, you’ll find out where they are.”

Leonard’s books have become increasingly verbal ever since. Where other crime writers mourned the coming of the cell phone as the loss of a suspense tool (“Where’s a pay phone?!”), Leonard loved it. His characters in Road Dog may spend more time yakking on their mobiles than actually speaking face-to-face.

Leonard and his wife Christine, longtime residents of the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, have five children and nine grandchildren. Though he’s still in top form, he’s inevitably asked if he plans to retire anytime soon.

“No, there is nothing else I want to do,” he says. “I have no reason to quit. I’d be bored.”

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Vikas Swarup

Interview by Abby Plesser

by Abby Plesser

Unless you were living under a rock this past Oscar season, you’ve undoubtedly heard the buzz about Slumdog Millionaire. But what you might not know is that Danny Boyle’s beloved film was actually the adaptation of a successful novel, Q&A, from Indian diplomat turned author Vikas Swarup.

Swarup’s new novel, focused on the murder of a high society Indian playboy with a knack for getting out of trouble, is not your typical murder mystery. Instead, Six Suspects intricately weaves the stories of six different people (the six suspects of the murder in question) against a fascinating backdrop of modern India.

Swarup, who comes from a family of lawyers, currently serves as India’s Deputy High Commissioner in South Africa. Adept at juggling his diplomatic career with his writing career, he answered questions from BookPage after completing work on Indian’s recent parliamentiary elections.

Six Suspects narrates the lives of six people—seven, if you count journalist Arun Advani’s columns. What was it like writing from so many different perspectives?
It was quite difficult. The difficulty stemmed not so much from the second book syndrome as from my choice of narrative structure. Writing about the interior lives of six different characters is much more complex than writing about the interior life of one character as in Q&A. I had to experiment with voice, with technique and at the same time ensure that my story remained coherent within the confines of the schematic space signposted by the section headings—Murder, Suspects, Motives, Evidence . . .

In the same vein, you cover such a vast range of characters, occupations and complex legal and social situations. How did you do your research?
I was trying to give the readers a glimpse of modern India through six different eyes. So you had to have a diverse range of characters covering a wide social spectrum. Research meant poring over books dealing with the Onge tribe in the Andaman Islands, learning about the modus operandi of mobile phone thieves, discussions with police officers on firearms, and a crash course in Texan English! The Internet was certainly a big help.

Did any of your characters surprise you as the narration progressed? Or did you plot out exactly who did what and when before you started writing?
I think several did. For instance, when I first started writing the diary of the Bollywood actress I thought of her as a vain, flippant celebrity who couldn’t see below the surface. I had initially conceived of her diary entries as being in the vein of chick-lit. But she surprised me with her erudition and emotional depth. She starts out as a clichéd sex symbol but by the end the reader has started feeling sympathetic towards her. The plot also mutated as the book went along.

This may be an impossible question for a writer, but do you have a favorite character in Six Suspects?
I think it is the stone-age tribesman Eketi. The choice of Eketi as a character was inspired by a report I had read of how during the 2004 tsunami the primitive tribes of the Andaman had remained safe using their powers of medicine and magic. I was interested in the interplay between two totally diverse cultures; what would happen when a primitive tribesman is confronted by the glittering lights of the modern world. Although I did a lot of research, eventually I had to get under the skin of the character and that proved to be quite difficult. How do you know how a stone-age tribesman behaves, what he thinks?

Despite your career as an Indian diplomat, you’ve been remarkably frank in depicting your home country in your fiction. Do you have any concerns about giving the rest of the world such an honest slice of Indian life?
Well, first of all, what I write is fiction. I do not wear my diplomat’s hat when I write fiction and my government allows me that freedom. As a writer, I have complete liberty to express myself in a literary work as long as it is clear that the views expressed do not represent the views of my government or mine in my official capacity. I also don’t feel defensive about what I write because at core I am extremely optimistic about India and that comes through in my novels, as well.

Tell us about your writing process. When and where do you do your best work?
Because I have a full-time day job, I do not have the luxury of writing whenever I want to. Besides, I can only write when I have a clear horizon ahead of me and no interruptions. So I write early in the mornings and on weekends only.

Has the success of Slumdog Millionaire had any effect on the way you approach your work as a writer?
When your first novel becomes such a huge success, the pressure on the second novel is much more. But I always ask myself the question, do I have a story to tell? As it turned out, I didn’t have just one story to tell, I had six, hence Six Suspects. The success of the first book has made me somewhat more self-conscious as a writer. But the good thing is, I still see myself primarily as a storyteller.

Six Suspects has already been optioned for film. Do you expect to be any more involved in this adaptation than you were in the making of Slumdog?
Six Suspects is a more ambitious book than Q&A. The characters are very diverse, the resolution is much more complex. So certainly I would take a much closer look at how it is translated onto the screen. In fact, I am myself curious to see how John Hodge (he has just been commissioned as the screenplay writer) adapts it. Whodunits are notoriously difficult to film. You can disguise the murderer in the novel, but how do you disguise it in a film, where everything is in your face?

What do you like to read for pleasure? Any recent favorites?
I have read many authors and many books over the years, from Albert Camus to Irving Wallace. I have been a big fan of the thriller genre, but I have enjoyed contemporary literary works as well, such as Coetzee’s Disgrace, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and the novels of Haruki Murakami.

What can we expect from you next? Do you have plans for a third novel? If so, can you tell us anything about it?
As long as I feel I have stories to tell, I will write. I have already begun my third novel. For a change, it is set outside India.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Teri Coyne

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

People who know Teri Coyne’s work as a stand-up comedian are going to be very, very surprised by her intense, emotionally wrenching first novel, The Last Bridge. There are many good words that could describe Coyne’s story of 28-year-old Alex “Cat” Rucker, an alcoholic waitress who fled her rural childhood home as a teenager then returns to confront her family demons 10 years later, after her mother’s suicide. “Page-turner,” perhaps. Or “psychologically compelling.” But “funny”? Most definitely not.

“People ask, wow, where did that come from?” Coyne says with a characteristic laugh during a call to her home on Long Island’s North Fork. For some years Coyne managed a technical writing and training team at a New York law firm and divided her time between an apartment in Queens and the 110-year-old house she bought and renovated on Long Island, while performing and writing on the side. The favorable early buzz about her first book has not entirely freed her from needing a job, but she now works as a consultant and spends more time at her North Fork home composing an early draft of a second novel. “I am drawn to the darker side of humor,” Coyne says. “I was inspired and influenced by comedians like Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks. But when I performed, I certainly wasn’t intense and dark like this book.”

The Last Bridge developed from a kind of vision Coyne had after abandoning standup in order to tell a larger story than she could in her comedy routines. “The book started with an image in my head of a mother taping garbage bags to the wall, a shotgun and the opening line of the book: ‘Two days after my father had a massive stroke, my mother shot herself in the head.’ Once I heard that voice, I couldn’t stop. I wrote the opening line and it just started coming. Looking back, it started at a time in my life when I was exploring this concept of what makes a family, what makes a person a parent. Is it blood or is it choice? Are we the product of our experiences? Or are we the product of our choices? As I started to write this story, it became very clear that that was really what I was trying to explore.”

The exploration did not go entirely smoothly. “Clearly when it takes you 10 years to write a book, you’re not in a big hurry to get something out there,” Coyne says, laughing. “This was my first book. I was learning the process of writing a novel while I was working on it. My goal was not publication but rather to make it the best story I could make it. That meant spending a lot of time writing and rewriting and focusing on getting the tone right.”

Interestingly, Coyne says that she had to leave her house to write the most difficult parts of the book. “When I was working on something that was really, really emotional it was easier for me to just go sit in a public space because for some reason I’m not as distracted in a public space.”

Although she can’t listen to music while she writes, Coyne uses music to get into the writing. She developed playlists for each character she was working on. “Every character has a song and that song just puts me immediately into the head of that person,” she says. Her playlists are on iTunes and her website.

Coyne’s early struggles to learn her craft were not helped by the nature of her central character, Alex, otherwise known as Cat. “It’s very difficult to write a character that you know your reader is not going to like right away. Cat is not a very likeable person in the beginning. But I felt very protective of her. I had to find a way to keep readers with me until I could show who she really is. Anger is not a real emotion and Cat’s anger is a disguise for something deeper. I had to find a way to show what that anger is covering.”

Part of what Alex is covering—or running from—is an abusive relationship with her father. Coyne’s unnerving portrait of that relationship draws on research she did with victims of abuse and from her own family history.

“Cat is not me,” Coyne says, “and none of the characters are reflective of people or characters in my own life, but some of their qualities are composites. That said, I made them all up, so they really are me. I dedicate the book to my father. He had a drinking problem and he had abusive and violent behavior. I struggled with that, as did all the people in our family. There’s this very private thing that happens inside of the family and then there’s this public life you lead in school or outside of the family. You learn very early that your family situation is not something you share outside of your family.”

“I had a lot of friends who had siblings who were kind of the black sheep or developed drug problems or drinking problems,” Coyne recalls. “People thought these people were broken, that something was wrong with them, that they were weak, that they didn’t have any ambition. But the older that I got and the more that I talked to people and saw what really happens to people who come from abusive families, I saw that these are not weak people. These are people that are masquerading a tremendous amount of pain. As I started to learn more and understand more, I started to really see that we have these notions or conceptions about people who are troubled that often aren’t really honest about what that person is really going through. It’s very, very important for me to shed light on that.”

As a result of this passion for bringing light to a difficult subject, Coyne’s empathic and ultimately redemptive first novel has struck a chord with early readers in ways that have completely amazed her. “It has been a lifelong dream of mine to get a book sold and published,” she says. “It’s a phenomenal thing that has happened to me. But I have to say I am in total awe of the reading community. It has just really blown me away how passionate readers are and how they do go out of their way to make contact with me and how dedicated they are to getting the word out about The Last Bridge. It’s really impressive and inspiring.”

The feeling, it seems, is completely mutual.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

People who know Teri Coyne's work as a stand-up comedian are going to be very, very surprised by her intense, emotionally wrenching first novel, The Last Bridge. There are many good words that could describe Coyne’s story of 28-year-old Alex “Cat” Rucker, an alcoholic waitress…

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Dan Brown

Interview by Edward Morris

by Edward Morris

What if a secret society possessed indisputable proof that Christianity in general—and the Catholic Church in particular—are built on historical error? To what extremes might zealous defenders of the faith go to find and destroy such potentially catastrophic evidence? These are the premises that set Dan Brown's absorbing new novel, The Da Vinci Code, in motion and then send it pinballing through a labyrinth of intricate schemes, sidetracks and deceptions.

Threaded through the story are plot-related codes and cryptograms that impel the reader to brainstorm with the protagonists, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (introduced in Angels & Demons) and French police cryptologist Sophie Neveu. An after-hours murder at the Louvre swirls these two strangers into the middle of an ongoing combat between the Priory of Sion, a shadowy order that dates back to the Crusades, and Opus Dei, a relatively new bastion of Catholic conservatism.

"I first learned of [Leonardo] Da Vinci's affiliation with the Priory of Sion when I was studying art history at the University of Seville," Brown says in a telephone interview from his home in New Hampshire. "One day, the professor showed us a slide of The Last Supper and began to outline all the strange anomalies in the painting. My awareness of Opus Dei came through an entirely different route and much later in my life. After studying the Vatican to write Angels & Demons, I became interested in the secrecy of the Vatican and some of the unseen hierarchy. Through that, I also became interested in Opus Dei and met some of the people in it."

While the characters and storylines of The Da Vinci Code are manifestly his own contrivances, Brown stresses that all the contextual details about history, biography, location and art are true. "One of the aspects that I try very hard to incorporate in my books is that of learning," he says. "When you finish the book—like it or not—you've learned a ton. I had to do an enormous amount of research [for this book]. My wife is an art historian and a Da Vinci fanatic. So I had a leg up on a lot of this, but it involved numerous trips to Europe, study at the Louvre, some in-depth study about the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei and about the art of Da Vinci."

Weighty as it is, Brown's scholarship never slows down the sizzling action. Robert and Sophie stay on the run at a breathless pace as menacing characters pop up in their flight path like silhouettes in a shooting gallery. Unlike a conventional mystery, in which clues become clear only in hindsight, many of the clues here are presented as such: a dying murder victim who arranges his body a particular way, a slip of paper with a phrase scribbled on it that may be a light-shedding anagram, a line of seemingly random numbers.

"For some reason, I was a good math student," Brown says, explaining his involvement with codes and symbols. "And language came easily. Cryptology and symbology are really fusions of math and language. My father is a well-known mathematician. I grew up around codes and ciphers. In The Da Vinci Code, there's a flashback where Sophie recalls her grandfather creating this treasure hunt through the house for a birthday present. That's what my father did for us."

Beyond spinning a good yarn within a richly factual context, Brown admits to yet another aim. "I am fascinated with the gray area between right and wrong and good and evil. Every novel I've written so far has explored that gray area." He reveals that his next novel will deal with "the oldest and largest secret society on earth" and with "the secret history of our nation's capital."

Brown concedes that turning Christianity's most fiercely held beliefs into fictional fodder may spark some controversy. But he says it's a risk worth taking. "I worked very, very hard to make the book fair to all parties. Yes, it's explosive. I think there will be people for whom this book will be—well, 'offensive,' may be too strong a word. But it will probably raise some eyebrows."