Deadly Animals, Marie Tierney’s brilliantly plotted debut mystery, introduces readers to Ava Bonney: a 14-year-old English girl obsessed with decomposing bodies.

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Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Jon Steele

Interview by Eliza Borné

by Eliza Borné

Set in Lausanne, Switzerland, Jon Steele's debut novel is a haunting and suspenseful thriller about an American call girl, a British private eye and Marc Rochat, the bell ringer at the city's cathedral. The characters' lives intersect after a series of murders in Lausanne . . . and it turns out the villain may not be of this earth. The novel is the first in a trilogy.

Steele, who is also the author of War Junkie, a memoir about working as a cameraman in combat zones, answered questions about his journalism background and the fun of writing minor characters.

Your autobiography, War Junkie, is about your experiences as a cameraman in war zones. What is more challenging for you: Writing fiction or memoir? What is more rewarding?
Someone asked me, why did you write War Junkie? I said, “It was either that or jump off a bridge.” I wasn’t kidding. WJ was about redemption. Watching people suffer and die in a lens and not doing a damn thing to help is a terrible sin. It was also my job. There was a price. I am not normal. I live with ghosts. I’m just this side of sane and alive.

“Tough to categorize’’ is an expression I hear a lot. I take it as a compliment. I love thinking a reader can open The Watchers and set out on a journey of imagination without a roadmap.

I don’t think about what’s more challenging. I won’t do memoirs again. I confessed once.

But the search for redemption, the thing that drove me to write WJ, drives me still. The Watchers is about ghosts, good angels, bad angels, the innocent and the dead. It’s about me looking at the world, with my “once a Catholic, always a Catholic” eyes.

The only reward is me inventing a world that helps me keep the ghosts in the closet. Evil is real, and it stalks the world in the forms of men.

How have your experiences observing combat informed your fiction?
You know, you’re the first person to ask me this question, so I never thought about it. And these days I try not to think about things I’ve seen from the backend of a camera. Once in awhile I get asked to talk about it. The last time was for a documentary called Under Fire: Journalist in Combat. I was a wreck for almost a year after. The film was shortlisted for the 2011 Academy Awards. I still haven’t seen it.

But here’s the deal. I did my job and risked my life, time and again, because I believed in the nobility of journalism. I had a camera, I was one of the good guys. How that informs my fiction is as plain as the title. In the Hebrew Bible, angels—the creatures from another place sent to protect the creation—are called Watchers.

Cameraman . . . Watchers. Bingo.

It was easy to take the mind-bending conflict of a cameraman watching innocent people die, for the greater good of getting the truth onscreen and into the world, and injecting it into angels . . . letting innocent people die for the greater good of saving all that’s left of paradise.

Me and the angels were the same. We both wanted to save the world.

The distinction is that I did it because I chose to believe it was the right thing to do. Angels, as extensions of another’s will, do it because they have no choice. Blurring that distinction is the spiritual core of The Watchers.

Your novel is tough to categorize. There are elements of fantasy, thriller, noir. Did you set out to write in any particular genre? What do you personally like to read?
“Tough to categorize’’ is an expression I hear a lot. I take it as a compliment. I love thinking a reader can open The Watchers and set out on a journey of imagination without a roadmap.

Did I start out with a genre in mind? Not really. I knew I’d play to the obvious connection between a man who calls the hour in Lausanne (for real, in the 21^st century) and Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (once upon a time, in a far away land)—meaning I wanted to mine Hugo’s classic for all it was worth. That meant incorporating similar elements of adventure, violence, romance religion, mysticism . . . come to think of it, Hunchback of Notre Dame is hard to categorize. So it’s all Hugo’s fault.

What do I read? I assume that means books I go back to over and over again. Raymond Chandler, Grahame Greene, Jack London, George Orwell, Shakespeare, William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Hans Fallada, Mario Vargas Llosa, Tolstoy, Dickens, P.G. Wodehouse, Jane Austin. I read poetry a lot, old stuff. As you can see, I live in a different time.

Which of your three main characters (Marc Rochat, the bell ringer; Katherine Taylor, the call girl; or Jay Harper, the private eye) was the most fun to write?
Impossible to answer. I don’t know how to answer it without spilling the beans about the story. The three main characters are reflections of my own personality, as much as they are their own beings. I defined limits within which the characters could “live.” They were free to do and say as they wished. There was only one rule: They could not escape their fate. Sometimes, one of three would try to pull the wool over my eyes, and I’d have to herd them back into the plot.

I remember my wife reading the manuscript. She came to the end and threw it at me, all 547 pages of it. She cried and yelled, “No! You can’t do this! Change it, please!” I knew I had it right, because in truth, my wife knew what was coming . . . but when it happened, it was still a shock.

To be honest, I had the most fun with the minor characters. The oddballs, junkies and ghosts who appeared now and then to guide the three main characters along their journey. There’s one in particular. He’s called Saxophoneman. Marc Rochat crosses his path in the halls of the Lausanne train station. Saxophoneman delivers one of my favorite lines in The Watchers: “Ain’t nothing sadder than an angel in nowtimes, little dude.” I liked him so much I’ve brought him back in the next book of the trilogy.

Your novel is described as “Hunchback of Notre Dame meets The Silence of the Lambs, as told by Justin Cronin.” That’s quite a promise! What kind of reader do you think will enjoy your book?
Like I said, anyone who wants to take a journey without a roadmap.

The Watchers is the first book in a trilogy. What comes next?
Angel City is next, then The Way of Sorrows. It’s taking longer than I thought it would, but that’s what happens when you set out without a roadmap. I already know the last line of the third book. It’s just a matter of getting there. And that’s all I’m going to say about it.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

Elizabeth Haynes

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

by Stephenie Harrison

British author Elizabeth Haynes started a novel one November, little suspecting that her story of a young woman who falls in love with the wrong man would eventually become a big bestseller—and Amazon U.K.'s reader-selected Best Book of 2011. With a movie adaptation and the book's U.S. publication date on the horizon, Haynes took some time out to answer our questions about this chilling first novel.

Into the Darkest Corner began as a National Novel Writing Month project. What was it about NaNoWriMo that worked so well for you?
I wouldn’t have completed a novel (and so never have been published) without NaNoWriMo. It’s very difficult to find time to write while working, being a mum and a wife and a daughter, and so having one month a year when I could prioritise writing was a complete gift. More than anything, in November writing is such great fun that it’s surprisingly easy to get carried away with the story. I still find it very difficult to write at other times of the year, so the first draft of all my books is written in November and I will carry on doing this.

Your book deals with heavy topics such as domestic abuse and mental illness, particularly PTSD and OCD. How much research did you do into these topics, and to what extent do you think writing fiction requires thorough background research?
I think research is pretty essential. There’s nothing that ruins a story more than some glaring inaccuracy or improbability, and besides that I think if you are going to write about something that, for real people all over the world, is a condition they have to live with day to day, the least you can do as an author is paint a reasonable picture of what it is they go through. Whatever I read, I like to learn something, and my expectation as a reader even from fiction is that what’s presented is reliable. For Into the Darkest Corner, after I’d finished the first draft I spoke at some length to a close friend who is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist—she was able to explain what would happen when Cathy sought help with her condition, and she recommended some great books which really helped to get a feel for how people live with OCD. More importantly, she recognised that the way I’d written Cathy’s symptoms showed that it was likely she had elements of PTSD as well, which led to further research.

There are some graphic scenes of sexual violence in Into the Darkest Corner that are truly terrifying. Were you ever surprised or scared that you were able to take your characters to such dark places?
It was scary writing some of those scenes so I hope that feeling comes across for the readers, too. The more time I spent with the traumatised Catherine, the more I realised that I was building up to writing the scene detailing what actually happened to her, and that it was going to have to be bad. By the time I got there it had become very difficult to write, not only because having got to know these characters so well it’s hard to put them in that dark, terrible place, but also because I was aware in writing it that this sort of thing does happen to real people, every day. So yes, it was difficult but it had to be done, and I think if I’d turned away from that scene or glossed over it, I would have done a disservice to the people who have survived assaults like that, and worse.

Fear makes everything in life unnecessarily harder to deal with.

It’s fairly safe to say that Cathy, your heroine, has experienced one of the worst boyfriends and breakups that one could ever imagine. Care to share your own worst breakup story?
I’ve never experienced physical violence or aggression in a relationship, but I have had relationships that have been controlling. For a while in my late 20s I behaved pretty much as Catherine did before she met Lee. When I was writing Into the Darkest Corner I was very aware that the relationship she falls into is something that could have happened to me and I was very lucky to have come out of what I recognise now as a crazy and reckless time unscathed. I learned a lot from it; perhaps most of all that it’s important to make your intentions clear, and to consider the other person’s point of view. I had a relationship with a guy that I believed was a casual one, since I often didn’t see him for weeks or months at a time, and was based around whether I happened to see him when I was out with friends—so when I went into a serious relationship I didn’t really consider that he might not be happy with our association coming to an end. He called me out of the blue hoping to meet up and I told him I wasn’t free; the next few nights I kept getting calls from strangers and it turned out that my name and phone number had been posted on a singles website. I assume it was his revenge.

One of the scariest things about this book is that it paints a very convincing picture of just how easy it can be to get trapped in an abusive relationship; initially, Lee really does seem like the perfect boyfriend. In the work you’ve done as an intelligence analyst for the police, you’ve come across hundreds of cases involving domestic abuse, so are there any particular warning signs you think women should be on the look out for when embarking on a new relationship?
Controlling behaviour is easy to spot in someone else’s relationship, but very difficult to see in your own, because emotions get in the way. This is why I think close friends and family have such a responsibility to look out for you, and also why trying to isolate you from the people who care about you, controlling who you can see and when, is a big warning sign for a potentially abusive relationship. It’s portrayed by the abuser as a sign of their love for you, that they need you, that your friends don’t care about you in the same way—and once you are focused on that, you end up isolating yourself still further.

As hard as it is, I think one of the best defences against a relationship like this is the ability to remain objective about it—if this was happening to a friend, what advice would you give: put up with it, or get out? Being honest with yourself is so important—but so difficult to do when emotions are involved.

Quite understandably, Cathy has a slew of fears that plague her on a daily basis. One thing she winds up finding quite helpful is ranking them in order of most to least threatening. If you had to name your biggest fear, what would it be?
My biggest fear is probably the same one that most people have—something happening to my loved ones. Most of the time, though, I make a conscious effort not to be afraid. Fear makes everything in life unnecessarily harder to deal with. When I was pregnant with my son, I read a lot about how fear reduces your pain threshold and so I really tried not to be afraid of labour and childbirth. Admittedly I was lucky and everything went well, but I still went through nearly 24 hours of labour with no pain relief stronger than two Advil. He was 9lbs 3oz.

One of my favourite books is Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway which I first read in my early 20s. It taught me a lot about how any fear at all is at its most basic level a fear of loss of control, or of not being able to handle a situation. Once you recognise that and consider what, realistically, will happen, everything becomes much easier.

Prior to writing your own thriller, were you a big fan of the genre? Are there any authors that your particularly admire?
I’ve been a fan of the thriller genre since I first read Agatha Christie as a teenager. I love police procedurals although having worked in the police environment some of them are now difficult to read because they are quite unrealistic. An exception to this, however, is John Harvey—his books, as well as being brilliant, have a great note of authenticity. I am a big fan of Ruth Rendell, Nicci French and Mo Hayder, each for different reasons: Rendell is a genius at unpicking the most disturbing threads of the human psyche; French explores narrative structure in each book, making for an intriguing and fresh read every time; and Hayder is not afraid to tackle violence as it often is, dirty, grim, painful—even when this makes for an uncomfortable read.

How did you celebrate when you found out that Into the Darkest Corner had been named Amazon UK’s Best Book of 2011?
I found out almost by accident! I knew the results of the Rising Star of the Year were going to be announced and I was checking the page regularly. As this is based on the number of positive reviews, I was aware that Into the Darkest Corner was marginally in the lead, so it was wonderful but not a massive surprise when I saw the announcement that it had won. Then I noticed the phrase “click here to see why this is our book of the year” and I clicked the link to the Amazon Best Book of 2011 chart, showing Into the Darkest Corner as the number one. This was so completely unexpected that I genuinely thought it was a mistake. The next day at work I got someone to check the list on their smartphone to see if I’d misunderstood it somehow. Even when I knew it was real, I still had no idea what a big deal it was and how much it would change things for me and for the books—if I had, I think I would have celebrated a whole lot more than I did!

Each step of the publication process has been amazing for me—if you look on my Facebook page there are some pictures of me watching the first print run being bound into books at the printers, and it’s quite clear that I’m practically delirious with excitement. I don’t take anything for granted, because I still can’t quite believe all the things I’ve dreamed of my whole life are coming true.

There are plans to turn Into the Darkest Corner into a film. How involved are you going to be in bringing your novel to the screen? If you had your way, who would you love to see playing Cathy, Lee and Stuart?
I’ve been immensely lucky here, too: the director of the film version of Into the Darkest Corner is Tinge Krishnan, and she is also writing the script. We’ve had plenty of in-depth discussions about the plot and the characters and she has even met up with some of my police colleagues to get a proper “feel” for Lee and his environment. I believe the way Tinge has allowed me to be involved like this is quite unusual but it’s worked well for us—she completely understands what I was trying to bring across with the book. I recently got the chance to read an early draft of the script, and it just blew my mind. Tinge is such a genius. It felt to me like she had taken the characters I’d described in black and white, and coloured them in.

As to the cast . . . well, I had some clear ideas when I was writing the story, but these have changed completely since reading the script—and will no doubt change again when the casting gets underway!

Now that you’ve published one novel to such great acclaim are you writing full time or have you still kept your “day job” working for the police?
I’ve just started a two year career break, so although I’m still in touch with the organisation but I have a fantastic opportunity to write and see where it takes me.

It was a hard decision to make because it was a fantastic job, and I worked with a really great team of people. I’m still in touch with a lot of them and they’ve been very supportive of my writing, for which I am eternally grateful. I miss them all—but who knows? Maybe I will be back in a couple of years if there is still room for me!

RELATED CONTENT
Read our review of Into the Darkest Corner.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

7 questions with . . . Daniel Friedman

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

The title of Daniel Friedman’s debut mystery—Don’t Ever Get Old—should probably be read in your best Clint Eastwood impersonation. Possibly with a Lucky Strike clamped between your teeth. It’s our June 2012 Top Pick in Mystery, and Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney calls it “one of the most original and entertaining tales I have read in many a moon.”

We chatted with the man behind this awesome Geezer Noir about his crochety protagonist, the process of growing older and what’s next.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Don’t Ever Get Old is about Baruch “Buck” Schatz, an 87 year-old retired cop and World War II veteran who goes hunting for a fugitive Nazi officer and a lost cache of stolen treasure.

When you’re in your 80s, what do you hope to be doing?
My Bubbi, Goldie Burson, is 86 years old and she’s amazing. She goes to the gym at the Jewish Community Center four days a week. She was already there when I showed up on Wednesday morning, and when I finished my workout, she was still going. She does 20 minutes on the elliptical and 35 on the treadmill. Goldie is inspiring. We should
all hope to be so lucky.

Fifty years ago, it seems like people tended to be on the way down by their mid-60s, and these days retirees routinely run marathons and climb mountains. I hope that, by the time I get there, 80 really will be the new 60, and I’ll be playing golf every day. But consider this: When Goldie works out, she doesn’t improve. Despite all her efforts, she’s slower than she was last year, and next year she won’t be as fast as she is now. Senior citizens today often endure for years or even decades after their bodies and minds begin to deteriorate, and if the future brings with it a longer active late-adulthood, it may also bring with it a longer period of decline.

Being young is about hope and about expectation. Tomorrow you’re going to run faster or lift more weight. Next year you’re going to find true love. Within five years, you’ll have that promotion, and you’ll make more money. But at a certain age, the expectation that things will get better reverses on you. That’s what Buck is facing in Don’t Ever Get Old.

“If Buck has the drop on you, and you’ve got a gun tucked in your waistband, he’s not going to ask you if you feel lucky. Your luck has already run out.”

They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but it isn’t true. Invasive surgeries don’t make you stronger. Hypertension doesn’t make you stronger. Arthritis doesn’t make you stronger. Buck Schatz is a war veteran and a retired police detective. His identity and his idea of virtue is based on being tough and self-reliant. A big part of the story is about how he struggles to cope with becoming increasingly frail and dependent on others. And a lot of older people are having to deal with the same kind of circumstances.

Would you make a good cop?
There’s a great line in the movie Touch of Evil about how the Orson Welles character was “a great detective but a lousy cop.” I think that’s Buck, to some extent, and it’s probably what I’d turn out to be.

Being a policeman means never being safe. There are more guns than people in the United States, so even when a cop is doing something as innocuous as traffic or parking enforcement, there’s always a chance that he’ll find himself dealing with somebody armed and angry. It’s very easy for almost any interaction to escalate into a perilous situation, and something like that has to affect the way people see the world. I think it would make me very angry, and probably very dangerous.

I’ve been reading Elmore Leonard‘s Raylan Givens books lately, and I think it’s real cool how Raylan stands there with his fingers hooked into his belt, waiting for the bad guys to make their move before he draws and shoots them. But I can’t really see myself acting that way in the same circumstances, so I write a different sort of character. Buck Schatz is more interested in getting home in one piece than in maintaining a sense of fair play. He figures that if he gives the bad guys a chance to draw on him, sooner or later, one of them is going to be faster. I don’t think he would ever shoot an unarmed man, but if he’s facing an armed suspect, he’d probably shoot without warning.

Even though Dirty Harry is an obvious influence for me, if Buck has the drop on you, and you’ve got a gun tucked in your waistband, he’s not going to ask you if you feel lucky. Your luck has already run out.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
The best mystery novel I’ve ever read is The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

What is your favorite thing about being a writer?
I always say that having written is much better than writing. But coming up with something really clever or finding a great joke in a situation is pretty rewarding.

How do you conquer writer’s block?
The hardest scenes to write are the ones that come between the stuff that goes in the outline or synopsis. If you’re bad at those, your novel chokes on them. It’s so easy to get stuck for days between a couple of major plot-points, and those transitional scenes always end up needing the most revision.

I find rye whiskey helps, though.

What are you working on next?
I’ve got two projects I’m working on right now.

One is a sequel to Don’t Ever Get Old. The first book has very few flashbacks because I wanted to keep the focus on Buck’s present circumstances. I feel like I’ve explored that theme now, so in the next one, I’m free to look back into the past and see what else we can learn about this character. I’ve also got an interesting new antagonist for him: a master-thief who survived the Holocaust and clashed with Buck in the ’60s returns to make an offer Buck might not be able to refuse.

The other is a historical mystery that I’m very excited about. The hero is Lord Byron, the legendary romantic poet, and I’ve tangled him up in a series of murders in 1807 Cambridge, England. Byron believes, based on very little evidence, that the killings involve his supposedly-dead father, but he’s more of a dilettante than a detective, and he gets in over his head very quickly.

The title of Daniel Friedman's debut mystery—Don't Ever Get Old—should probably be read in your best Clint Eastwood impersonation. Possibly with a Lucky Strike clamped between your teeth. It's our June 2012 Top Pick in Mystery, and Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney calls it "one…

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Joy Castro

Interview by Brooke Allen

by Brooke Allen

Joy Castro’s debut thriller, Hell or High Water, is set in New Orleans almost three years after Hurricane Katrina’s devastation. In this page-turner, Times-Picayune reporter Nola Céspedes is longing for a story that will launch her career as a serious journalist, but an assignment on missing registered sex offenders is not what she had in mind. When she discovers that the recent outbreak of abductions in the city may be linked to her story, Nola sets out to find the culprit—uncovering much about her own past in the process.

In a Q&A with BookPage, Castro explains her love for New Orleans and the challenges of writing a crime novel.

Hell or High Water is very vividly set in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina. On your website you explain that your husband is from Louisiana, and you’ve been visiting the city for 20 years. Why does post-Katrina New Orleans make a good setting for a crime novel?
Thank you! Katrina hit in August, 2005, and the book is set in April, 2008.

Hell or High Water works particularly well in post-Katrina New Orleans because the novel looks specifically at sex crimes, which have a long aftermath. There’s the initial trauma, and then there’s the long, difficult, uncertain process of coming back, of healing. Just because offenders are caught and convicted—and often they’re not—does not mean the damage is somehow magically healed. Recovering is a process. It takes time, and it’s frustrating and painful to the survivors, who often don’t get the help they need.

You’re probably already anticipating the analogy. The city of New Orleans, which is still wrestling with the aftermath of Katrina’s devastation, experienced a similar story writ large. The storm itself was over by September, but its fallout, both in terms of the emotional trauma and the practical difficulties of rebuilding, has lasted for years.

No matter how committed they are, survivors can become exhausted, frustrated, heartbroken, fed up. That’s the story I wanted to tell: the story of aftermath.

What do you love most about the city?
The people. They’re gritty, resilient, smart, strong and passionate. There’s also a tremendous, joyous insistence on pleasure in New Orleans, as well as a hard-boiled gallows humor, which my protagonist Nola shares.

The city is also very beautiful, and its layered cultural history is dense, conflicted and complicated: Native American, French, Senegalese, Congolese, Spanish, Anglo, Italian, Irish and more. I wanted to honor that beauty and complexity.

Like almost everyone, I also love the spectacular music and food of New Orleans. That was the most delicious part of the research—eating, drinking and going out everywhere that Nola would go.

There’s a tremendous, joyous insistence on pleasure in New Orleans, as well as a hard-boiled gallows humor, which my protagonist Nola shares.

This is your first novel. How was the experience of writing Hell or High Water different from writing the nonfiction or short fiction you’ve published?
I’d never worked from an outline before, but I did so with this novel, because it was very important to make sure all the pieces fit together precisely.

When I wrote my memoir The Truth Book, I already knew the story, since I had lived it; I just had to write it. With short fiction, I generally write toward a line or an image, and discover the story as I go.

But a novel—especially a plot-driven novel like a thriller—is a much more complicated organism, with a lot of moving parts. I had to make the story up from scratch, and I had to test the logic of the narrative. Writing an outline let me do that.

In the novel, Nola, a reporter, researches a story about the registered sex offenders who have gone off the grid since Katrina. How did you come up with this plot? What sort of research did you do?
It’s rooted in fact. During the hurricane evacuation, over 1,300 registered sex offenders went off the grid. By early 2008, when Hell or High Water is set, 800 had still not been relocated. That’s true, and that was provocative to me. I thought, That’s a story. What happened to those people? Where are they now? Are they back in New Orleans? Are they a threat? So I thought it would be interesting to have a reporter investigate the story, to see where it took her and what she learned.

I have so much respect for newspapers and journalism in general and for the Times-Picayune in particular, so I made Nola a Times-Picayune reporter.

In terms of research, I learned a lot about various sexual offenses, including nonviolent, non-threatening ones, and the psychology of different kinds of sexual criminals. I also learned about various methods of rehabilitation: what works, what really doesn’t. I was helped by some great university research librarians. All of the information and statistics in the book are drawn from recently published scholarship.

Finally, I researched the long-term effects of sexual crimes on survivors, such as the increased incidence of depression, suicide attempts, drug and alcohol abuse and destructive relationships even long after the assault takes place.

This is a serious problem that our society faces. Sending a rapist to jail does not solve everything for the person who’s been raped.

The interviews with sex offenders in the novel stay away from cliché and portray these characters as real human beings. To what extent did you base Nola’s interactions on reality?
Thank you. I’m glad you think so.

Well, sex offenders are real human beings, so I started there. Let me first clarify that Nola does distinguish in the novel between mild, nonviolent offenses, like consensual sex between a 19-year-old and a younger teenager who are in a relationship together, and the kinds of serious, violent sex offenses, like rape and molestation, of which we usually think in these discussions.

But even regarding these serious, damaging offenders, I wanted to write compassionately and realistically about people who, because they do things that are so heinous, are often written off as monsters, as being too horrifying to contemplate or simply unworthy of our interest or concern. This isn’t true, of course. Rapists and child molesters are not uncommon, and they often pass for normal. They’re often people who’ve been hurt and damaged themselves, and they’re as varied and complex as any other population, so I wanted to show that.

I’m not particularly sympathetic; they need to be stopped. But while demonizing someone can satisfy our sense of moral outrage, it’s not very illuminating or interesting, and it doesn’t make for very good fiction.

Of course, the terror and trauma caused by sexual assaults are devastating, and many people react to sexual criminals in an extremely negative way. I understand that, and I tried to give that perspective a voice in the novel, too, by letting various characters express those feelings of pure revulsion and fear.

I didn’t interview any sex offenders myself for the purposes of writing this book. However, I had the unfortunate opportunity to observe one closely for two years during my early adolescence. After my parents divorced, my mother married a man who was later convicted and imprisoned for child molesting. I ran away at 14, an experience that The Truth Book details. It was a difficult experience, and I’ve been curious about the topic ever since.

What was the most challenging aspect of writing a crime novel?
Plot. Definitely.

My literary training was in high modernism: Faulkner, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf. That’s what I did my scholarly doctorate in, and that’s what I’ve been teaching at the college level for the last 15 years. So even though I wanted to write a thriller because I’ve always loved mysteries, I was initially drawn toward lyrical language and the interior, subjective world of imagery, memory and psychology rather than to plot and action.

Instead of implementing the law of cause and effect, I wanted my characters to sit around having epiphanies and profound thoughts—not a lot of suspense there! So I had to learn how to plot, to make one thing lead to another. It was a grueling process, and I went through many drafts of my outline and many drafts of the manuscript. I learned a lot.

Hell or High Water is the first in a series. What happens next? Do you have an arc in mind for how the series will play out?
Yes, I think so. Nola’s got her own demons, and in each book, the crimes she investigates affect her personally in some way.

In the next novel in the series, Nearer Home, which is also set in New Orleans (the title comes from a Robert Frost poem), Nola becomes uncomfortably involved in the murder of a journalist—one of her former teachers, in fact. She decides to solve the crime, but there’s a political angle, and things get complicated. She becomes a target herself.

In a long-term sense, Nola yearns to understand herself and her past, and since she’s Cuban American, the locale where the books are set may shift in the future. I’m really interested in politics and the environment, so those issues keep working themselves into the novels, too.

Are there any crime series or authors who inspired you to write in this genre?
Oh, yes. I’ve always loved mysteries and thrillers, beginning as a young child with the Bobbsey Twins series and moving on to Sherlock Holmes and others.

In adulthood, I’ve most loved the work of Dashiell Hammett, Dennis Lehane and Kate Atkinson. Those three knockout writers remain both inspirational and aspirational for me.

I also really enjoy the novels of Patricia Highsmith, Tana French and John Banville writing as Benjamin Black. After writing Hell or High Water, I found Raymond Chandler (where had he been all my life?), so he’s been an influence on Nearer Home. To relax and feel cozy, I like Alexander McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie series, which is set in Edinburgh. His books are so gentle. Comfort crime.

What are you reading now?
John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Though I’d read a couple of le Carré’s novels in high school, I had sort of forgotten about him. However, my husband and I recently stayed in an apartment in Spain that happened to have several of his books on the shelves. I started with A Murder of Quality, which was marvelous, and have been bingeing since then. They’re terrific.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

7 questions with . . . Linda Castillo

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

The July 2012 Women of Mystery are getting plenty of attention, but only one gets to be our Top Pick. Linda Castillo’s Gone Missing, the newest installment in her Amish thriller series, earns that honor with its gripping tale of murder and Rumspringa gone wrong. Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney writes, “With its wonderfully conflicted protagonist, and its incisive look into a society most of us know little about, Gone Missing is the unquestioned high point of one of the most compelling series in modern suspense fiction.”

Castillo talks Amish country, great books and great characters in a Q&A with BookPage.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Formerly Amish chief of police Kate Burkholder is asked to consult on a missing person case involving an Amish teenager by state agent John Tomasetti, and they discover links to cold cases that go back years—and soon become a murder investigation.

What is it about Amish Country that inspires such great thrillers?
Ohio’s Amish Country is a peaceful and bucolic place of rolling hills, farms and quaint towns. The Amish make it unique—there’s no place like it in the world. I think the element that makes it such a terrific setting for a thriller is the juxtaposition of the beautiful setting and the introduction of evil into it. That contrast is one of the things that prompted me to set my books among the Amish.

What is one book people might be surprised to know you have read?
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a post-apocalyptic book I couldn’t put it down. Epic.

What’s your favorite thing about being a writer?
It’s hard to name just one thing. I love writing stories, creating characters and the world in which they live. I love cooking up mysteries and having my characters work their way through all the red herrings to solve them—the scarier the better. Most of all, I love sharing all of those things with readers. For a writer, there’s no better feeling than to hear from a reader who loved the book.

If you had to be stranded on a desert island with one fictional character, who would you choose?
That’s a tough one because I’ve read so many books with intriguing characters. I’m thinking this is a toss-up between Lucas Davenport [from John Sandford‘s Prey series] and John Tomasetti. (I have huge crushes on both!) If I had to choose, I’d probably go with Tomasetti because I find him endlessly fascinating, and I know if I had the chance to sit down and talk to him, he’d end up surprising the hell out of me.

If you could take one of Kate Burkholder’s characteristics for yourself, what would it be?
It takes courage to be a police officer. Kate is a lot braver than I could ever be. She’s tackled and solved some tough cases that required a good bit of chutzpah. I think I’d like to have her courage.

What are you working on next?
I have two projects in the works. I’m nearly finished with the fifth book in my Kate Burkholder series. No title yet, but it’s a fascinating story that gives us a glimpse into Kate’s childhood and pits her against a villain like she’s never faced before. I’m also working on a standalone novel that has been calling to me for quite some time.

The July 2012 Women of Mystery are getting plenty of attention, but only one gets to be our Top Pick. Linda Castillo's Gone Missing, the newest installment in her Amish thriller series, earns that honor with its gripping tale of murder and Rumspringa gone…

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Killer suspense from Lisa Jackson

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

In her latest novel, You Don’t Want to Know, Lisa Jackson brings a woman’s greatest nightmare to life: What if your family told you your child was dead, but you didn’t know if you could believe them? We asked Jackson a few questions about scaring herself silly, the attractions of suspense and, of course, her pug.

You Don’t Want to Know explores some very dark recesses of the mind. How do you write a character who cannot be trusted?
It was tough. Ava is a complicated character and I wanted to make her vulnerable, yet have an inner strength, even when she questioned her own sanity. I had to work to make certain that the fractured woman on the pages was not a frightened victim, that she had strength and resolve. Actually I loved writing about her; she became so real to me as she dealt with one of life’s most horrific tragedies—that of losing a child. She’s a fighter, even when everyone, herself included, seems against her.

What is your favorite thing about living in the Pacific Northwest? How does this region help inspire creepy stories?
I’ve always lived in the Pacific Northwest and what I love is the freshness of it and the surprises around every corner. You can have lunch at Timberline Lodge, high on Mount Hood in the craggy Cascade Mountains, even ski year round if you want, then three hours later, walk along the beach and have dinner overlooking the Pacific Ocean at sunset. How fun is that? And the fog and the creepiness, the shadowy old-growth forests, the sheer cliffs that rise above a swirling surf? Talk about perfect for the kind of stories I write. There are tons of beautiful places on the earth, each with their unique qualities, but I really do love the place where I was born.

How are you able to tap into people’s greatest fears?
We all have fears and they are usually pretty basic, even primal. What I try to do is scare myself in a suspenseful scene, fall in love in a romantic scene and get angry in an intense scene. It’s all about imagination, I guess. [To me] there’s a major gulf between a scary scene and a bloody scene. Suspense does not equal gore in my estimation. Suspense equals fear . . . oh, well, maybe a fear of gore! I just roll with what scares the devil out of me!

How do you keep from scaring yourself with your own stories?
Oh, I don’t. I want to scare myself! If there’s no thrill for me, there probably won’t be for my readers either, and I always try to give them the thrill ride of their lives. Kind of a fun job, yes?

What do you do when you need to lighten things up?
Personally, when a scene is too intense for me, as the author, I finish it and LEAVE the computer. I go out for a walk, do a crossword puzzle, play with the dog, go see a friend, do anything to take a complete break from what is going on in the book. To lighten things up within the pages, if that’s what you mean, I change point of view. I start another scene where the characters haven’t yet learned of whatever dastardly event has taken place in the intense scene. It’s to give the readers a break. I think not only the author needs a little breathing room, but the readers, too. It’s all about peaks and valleys or, maybe, more like a lie detector test print out . . . calm, calm, a twitch, oh, my intense swings, a twitch or two, calm, calm . . . that kind of thing.

Does your writing process differ when you’re collaborating with your sister, Nancy Bush?
Oh, yes. Nancy and I are “in each other’s business” when she and I are working on a book. We plot it out together, taking into consideration each other’s advice, then, once the story line is approved, we kind of leapfrog through it. She writes, then I overwrite her scenes and go forward, then she overwrites my scenes and goes forward and on and on until the end of the book. When she and I write individual books, we offer “first read” advice or “plot” advice or “character” advice and a time or two she’s actually written a few scenes in my books, but it’s not as intensely unified as a project we co-write.

If you could hypnotize anyone and ask them one question, who would it be and what would you ask?
Wow, I just can’t single any one of them out. Okay, okay . . . let’s keep it to writing. I’d love to ask George R.R. Martin: “How in the world did you write those incredible books, create that world in your A Song of Ice and Fire series?” Seriously? How does he keep it all straight? Can you tell I’m a “Game of Thrones” fan?

You are a voice for a number of charities. How did you choose these charities, and why are they important to you?
I donate to a lot of charities, but those found on my website are the nearest and dearest for a variety of reasons. My compassion for animals led to my decision to put up the Southwestern Washington Humane Society and Equine Outreach listed on the site. These are only a couple of the organizations dedicated to the rescue of animals I support. As for Raphael House, it’s a Portland-based shelter for women and children who need a safe refuge from abuse. Though I’ve never been involved in an abusive relationship, I feel deeply for those who are threatened/abused by loved ones, the very people who vow to keep them safe! I can’t tolerate that kind of cruelty, nor abuse of animals. As for Molly Bears, this is a wonderful organization which puts teddy-type bears, made individually, into the arms of grieving parents who have lost an infant. As my family has experienced this kind of tragedy, I know personally the importance of the support for the pain that is almost a taboo topic. I encourage everyone to donate or volunteer to the cause of his/her choice. It’s important.

We love that you have a pug named Jackie O No! If you suddenly found yourself trapped in one of your own thrillers, would she be a good guard dog?
Oh . . . no! Unfortunately, I don’t think Jackie O No would come to my rescue. She is kind of “tough” around some other dogs, especially in her house or on a leash right beside me, but it’s all for show. Deep down, she’s pretty much a chicken. I’m thinking I’m a better “guard person” for her than she is “guard dog” for me!

What’s next for you?
I’m lucky enough to have a lot of projects in the horizon. In December, Unspoken, a book I recently rewrote will be available and I’m also working on another “colony” book, Something Wicked, with sister Nan (author Nancy Bush.) Those are always fun! Also, next year I’ll have Ready to Die, the next in the Alvarez/Pescoli Montana series and a new book, which I think will be called Tell Me that brings back some of my popular characters, Detective Pierce Reed and reporter Nikki Gillette (first introduced in The Night Before and The Morning After) and set once again, in one of my favorite cities, Savannah, Georgia. So, I’m pretty busy and I LOVE it!!! How lucky am I?

In her latest novel, You Don't Want to Know, Lisa Jackson brings a woman's greatest nightmare to life: What if your family told you your child was dead, but you didn't know if you could believe them? We asked Jackson a few questions about scaring…

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

7 questions with . . . Timothy Hallinan

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney has reviewed four of Timothy Hallinan’s fantastic thrillers—and each one has earned Mystery of the Month. His latest Poke Rafferty novel, The Fear Artist, earns that title for August 2012 with its tale of murder on the streets of Bangkok. Writes Tierney, “The pacing is intense, the characters are among the best in modern suspense fiction and the atmosphere is steamy and dangerous throughout.”

We talked with Hallinan about tough guys, great books and the seamy Bangkok setting.

Describe your book in one sentence.
It’s a thriller set in Bangkok about what happens when someone innocently draws the attention of the War on Terror and becomes possible “collateral damage,” which is a 21st-century euphemism for “dead.”

If you could take one of Poke Rafferty’s characteristics for yourself, what would it be?
Oh, boy. Poke is braver than I am, more resourceful, funnier, younger, better-looking, with better hair . . . I suppose it would be bravery. Most thriller writers are wusses. I just finished a bookstore tour with a well-known (and very good) writer whose series features not one but two brave guys, and it was a real thrill to learn that he’s just as big a doily as I am. Here we are, launching our characters across these lethal landscapes with death waiting at every misstep, and in real life we both get flustered when we miss a turn.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Finish. A writer is someone who finishes. Whatever it takes, finish. Inspiration exists, as Picasso said, but it has to find you working.

What is one book everyone needs to read?
This is a hard one. I read pretty much everything. At the risk of being pretentious, I’m going to say Anthony Trollope’s six-volume novel The Palliser, which tells one great love story over the course of an entire adult lifetime and sets it against a panorama of life in Victorian England and Ireland. And Trollope could write women, which Dickens (in my opinion) couldn’t.

What is it about Bangkok that inspires such great suspense fiction?
Extremes. Bangkok is, as Maugham said about Monaco, “A sunny place for shady people.” Bangkok is rich and poor, sinful and spiritual, noisy and serene, heartless and cheerful. And it’s growing at the rate of one million people a year as family and community structures in the countryside break down. These people are handmade for exploitation. And yet most Thais manage to maintain a kind of equanimity I can only envy.

How do you conquer writer’s block?
By writing my way through it. I don’t actually get traditional writer’s block. What I get is total book collapse as I write my way into something that seems completely impossible to solve, at which point I toss the book and start something else, only to realize (usually) that I DO know how to solve the problem. This happens to me three or four times on every book. I can always write something—it’s just usually not the thing I’m supposed to be writing.

What are you working on next?
The next Poke Rafferty (the sixth), which is tentatively titled For the Dead. I’m in the great phase, which is to say the first 35 to 40 percent, where I haven’t made any enormous mistakes yet, or if I have, I haven’t recognized them. And a book called King Maybe, which is the fourth book in another series, set in Los Angeles.

Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney has reviewed four of Timothy Hallinan's fantastic thrillers—and each one has earned Mystery of the Month. His latest Poke Rafferty novel, The Fear Artist, earns that title for August 2012 with its tale of murder on the streets of Bangkok.…

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Julia Keller

Interview by Jay MacDonald

by Jay MacDonald

Julia Keller loathed the assignment. What editor in his right mind would send her, cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune, to cover the aftermath of a tornado two hours west in Utica that had already been thoroughly chronicled by the paper’s own news staff? Did they need an emergency book review?

But it turns out there was one angle the news crew had overlooked, one that only a small-town West Virginia girl who at age nine once ran her own Encyclopedia Brown-inspired detective agency could have sleuthed out.

“What impressed me immediately was, how do you deal with the randomness of catastrophe? How do you wrap your mind around this?” Keller recalls. “Small towns are where there are many, many overlapping lives constantly rubbing up against each other; you’re constantly bumping up against other people’s joys and sorrows. It wasn’t my spiritual journey, but instead my journey to understand how the human spirit deals with the randomness of fate. As I got deeper into that idea, it propelled me back and back to Utica.”

Keller not only won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for her moving three-part Tribune series about the town’s resurrection, she also came away inspired to create a mystery series set in the fictional West Virginia hamlet of Acker’s Gap that would explore what she calls “Appalachian fatalism.”

The series debut, A Killing in the Hills, kicks off with just such random carnage: A gunman ducks into the town’s coffee shop just long enough to fire three shots, killing three senior regulars. Waitress Carly Elkins, the teenage daughter of county prosecuting attorney Belfa “Bell” Elkins, not only witnesses the shooting but recognizes the killer.

"Are you going to leave or are you going to stay? That is the essential question, the ground beneath your feet."

To varying degrees, the central characters—including aging sheriff Nick Fogelsong, Bell’s BFFs Ruthie and Tom Cox and even Charlie Sowards, aka “Chill,” the ne’er-do-well killer—are all victims of a mountain dysphoria that keeps expectations of life in these hills well in check. Bell, whose own horrific past is revealed as she hunts down the mastermind behind the murders, represents the rare few who escaped Appalachia and returned to help improve its fortunes.

“In S.E. Hinton’s wonderful novel, The Outsiders, she has a great line that those characters are very much about who will go and who will stay,” Keller says. “That’s the question, almost more than who you marry or whether you have a family or what your profession will be: Are you going to leave or are you going to stay? And if you stay, will it be with this ever-growing crust of bitterness, or do you stay for the best of reasons? That is the essential question, the ground beneath your feet.”

Don’t misunderstand: Keller’s upbringing in Huntington, West Virginia, was far from hardscrabble. Her father, a math professor at Marshall University, and her mother, a high school English teacher, imbued their daughter with a love of learning and a gift for storytelling. She went on to work as an intern for syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, earned a doctoral degree in English and was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard.

But what looks great on a resume doesn’t always resonate in the heart.

“There’s a line that a character uses in my next book, which is called Bitter River, that says, ‘The only way out is up,’” Keller says. “That’s a line I’ve heard my whole life and it’s so evocative, certainly in a physical and geographical sense but also in a spiritual sense. You have to overcome barriers even to get somewhere else.”

Keller does a masterful job of leaving spooky little unexplained blanks in each of her characters that prompt the reader to second-guess what they think they know about this slightly inchoate cast. For a central character, Bell remains the most elusive of all, by design.

“As I was writing, it occurred to me that there were these vast gaps where we don’t know a lot about the horrific crucibles she went through. Of course, the town’s name is Acker’s Gap, so you know there is more there,” Keller says.

Like Bell, Keller fled these hills to explore the world, yet finds herself drawn back now that time has sanded off the rougher memories. She recently left the Tribune to accept a teaching position at Ohio University in Athens, just up the road from her hometown in the heart of Appalachia. It’s the perfect vantage point from which to survey the peculiar fatalism of the area.

“A friend of mine who remained in Huntington as an ophthalmologist tells me that the biggest thing she faces in her patients isn’t that they’re lazy or have no willpower, it’s that they will look at her and say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t much matter. My father died in his 40s, my mother died in her 40s, it doesn’t much matter.’ It’s this fatalism, which is very different from cynicism. I thought if I could somehow show that in fiction, it would be a terrific way to address that feeling.”

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

7 questions with . . . Jussi Adler-Olsen

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

Copenhagen cold case investigator Carl Mørck rocketed onto the Scandinavian noir scene with last year’s The Keeper of Lost Causes, and he returns in The Absent One to seek justice for a decades-old unsolved murder. This tale of revenge and sociopathic socialites is proof that Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen has easily joined the front of the Nordic thriller pack.

Adler-Olsen answered our questions all the way from Iceland. He kept things short and sweet—well, maybe more salty than sweet.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Thrillastonishinggood.

Would you make a good investigator?
Oh yes, I solved my first mystery in 1960: Who scratched Per’s father’s car? (It was Per’s younger brother.) It took me 10 minutes to solve.

The report of each nation’s happiness index ranks Denmark as the happiest country in the world. Why are you guys so happy?
We are happy from absolute necessity. With the damp, cold winters and rainy summers, we have to, or else the suicide rate would go sky-high.

Why does happy Denmark make such a great setting for your crime novels?
Because I know everything about it.

What is one book you think every thriller fan should read?
A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin.

What is the greatest writing advice you’ve ever received?
Use the bathroom before taking your seat in front of the PC.

What are you working on next?
My next book.

Copenhagen cold case investigator Carl Mørck rocketed onto the Scandinavian noir scene with last year's The Keeper of Lost Causes, and he returns in The Absent One to seek justice for a decades-old unsolved murder. This tale of revenge and sociopathic socialites is…

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

7 questions with . . . Jo Nesbo

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

Jo Nesbø has been called the next Stieg Larsson, and this month, our Whodunit columnist calls his newest thriller, Phantom, “one of the finest suspense novels to come out of Scandinavia to date.” It’s our Top Pick in Mystery, and it’s “easily the most troubling and heartfelt” of the Harry Hole series.

We checked in with Nesbø to talk a bit about reading, Harry Hole and great writing advice.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Harry, back in Oslo from Hong Kong to prove that Rakel’s son Oleg is not a murderer, sets out on a dangerous investigation that takes him deep into the world of the most lethal drug to ever hit Oslo, and into the maze of his own past, where he will find the truth.

If you woke up in Harry Hole’s shoes one morning, what would you do?
I have no idea. Harry is good, and although he may not be my alter ego, I’ve certainly used a lot of my own person in Harry. Let’s say 70%. The best parts. Well, some of the not so good, too. But I must have put some of my analytical abilities in there, I believe.

What is one book readers might be surprised to know you have read?
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I’m glad it was short.

What is the greatest compliment you’ve received for your books?
When young people says it inspired them to write.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Be the psychopath. You have to be able to identify with a character, similar to how an actor works. It might be scary sometimes, but that’s what you have to do. Humans are complex; you’ll be able to find most things within yourself. Just use your imagination.

Some readers might not know that you are also the author of several children’s books in the Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder series. What was your favorite book as a child?
My favorite book as a child was Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. It was funny, had bizarre characters and suspense. And a bona fide murder.

What’s next?
Writing. Always writing.

Jo Nesbø has been called the next Stieg Larsson, and this month, our Whodunit columnist calls his newest thriller, Phantom, "one of the finest suspense novels to come out of Scandinavia to date." It's our Top Pick in Mystery, and it's "easily the…

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

J.T. Ellison

Interview by Eliza Borné

by Eliza Borné

On a blustery Sunday during Nashville’s Southern Festival of Books, local thriller author J.T. Ellison sits down to talk about Dr. Samantha Owens, the heroine in her new series about a medical examiner with a painful past. Owens will be familiar to Ellison’s many fans. She’s the best friend of homicide lieutenant Taylor Jackson, the star of Ellison’s seven previous books. Sam was even a point-of-view character in 2011’s Where All the Dead Lie, which was nominated for a RITA Award for Best Romantic Suspense.

Before Ellison could start a new series about the intelligent and intense medical examiner, though, she had to figure out a single crucial detail: She had to kill off Sam’s husband and two kids. (When the author invented Sam as a character in the Taylor Jackson books, she didn’t know that the medical examiner would eventually get her own series.)

“I fought against that,” says Ellison, who describes Sam as “the woman I’d want to take care of me.” (“Taylor is the chick I’d want to go get a drink with,” she quips.) But she wanted a clean break for Sam as she stepped forward as a main character. Ultimately, Ellison did not want her encumbered with a family. She wanted Sam to be broken at the beginning of A Deeper Darkness, the first book in the series, in order for her to be able to grow and develop as a character.

When the novel starts, we find out that Sam’s husband and children died in Nashville’s flood of May 2010, an event that was personal to Ellison, as she and her husband live in the city’s Bellevue neighborhood, which was majorly affected by the rising waters. The flood has terrible repercussions for Sam, who becomes convinced that her family members’ deaths were all her fault, and she develops Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in her grieving.

At the beginning of A Deeper Darkness, Sam is in this guilt-ridden emotional state when she gets a call from an ex-boyfriend’s mother in Washington, D.C. Eddie Donovan, her former love, has been murdered. His mom would like for Sam to perform a second autopsy, and she reluctantly agrees. Thanks to her astute observation in the D.C. morgue, it becomes obvious that Eddie’s death was not merely the result of a random hit-and-run. Sam gets drawn into a D.C. detective’s investigation of the murder, which blossoms into an investigation of several different murders of former military men, all members of Eddie’s Company in the 75^th Ranger Regiment. Are the deaths connected?

If one of Ellison’s goals is to accurately portray the lives of medical examiners or homicide lieutenants, she also wants to raise awareness of issues that are important to her.

Sam’s search races across the nation’s capital and even to a creepy off-the-grid cabin. Fans of the medical thriller genre will relish this fast-paced and emotional read, which is bolstered by Ellison’s thorough research.

For her Taylor Jackson books, Ellison went on ride-alongs with the Metro Nashville Police Department in order to make her scenes as real as possible. For A Deeper Darkness, she consulted with both soldiers and a medical examiner—and she even did autopsies on four bodies at a facility in Nashville. (When prodded to share the most surprising thing about the process, she says: “That I didn’t pass out!”)

At the book festival, Ellison jumps up from her chair to demonstrate how far she was from the bodies when she walked into the morgue—about 10 or so feet. But by the end of that day, she says, “I had my head in a chest cavity.” The author describes this very hands-on research trip as a “spiritual experience,” especially after it became so obvious that “we’re all exactly alike inside.”

If one of Ellison’s goals as an author is to accurately portray the lives of medical examiners or homicide lieutenants, she also wants to raise awareness of issues that are important to her. In the case of A Deeper Darkness, that would be the problem of fratricide and rape in the U.S. military. Instances of both horrific events are integral to the novel’s plot, and the book is dedicated to David H. Sharrett II, a real-life Private First Class who was killed in Iraq in 2008 as a victim of friendly fire. He was the son of Ellison’s favorite teacher in high school.

A Deeper Darkness is, indeed, a very dark book, but Edge of Black—its follow-up, which comes out in November 2012—has “lots of humor.” Ellison says that the “Sam books” are funnier than the “Taylor books,” and this second installment is gentler than A Deeper Darkness. Luckily for fans, the author recently signed a contract to write three more books in the series, so there will be much more of Dr. Samantha Owens to look forward to. Next year, Ellison’s fans can anticipate her new collaboration with best-selling romantic suspense author Catherine Coulter, with whom she is writing a series of thrillers called “A Brit in the FBI.” The first book in the series, Jewel of the Lion, is currently slated to come out in late summer of 2013.

When asked what scenes she looks forward to writing the most in her books, Ellison says without hesitating, “You want every scene you write to be something you look forward to.” Otherwise, she explains, readers won’t want to read them. And in fact, readers will happily devour Sam’s new series. A story of hope—with breakneck chase scenes, to boot—it is an exciting introduction to a new heroine of the forensic thriller genre.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

7 questions with . . . David Mark

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

An exceptionally unusual premise and the strong characterization of a gentle giant hero deliver the old one-two in the November 2012 Mystery of the Month, The Dark Winter by debut author David Mark. Writes whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney, “English critics have compared David Mark to the likes of Val McDermid and Ian Rankin. My prediction: It will not be long until new voices in the genre are hailed as the ‘next David Mark.'”

With such high praise for this first-time novelist, we had to check in and see what he had to say about crime writing and favorite books.

Describe your book in one sentence.
In the midst of a bleak winter in the Northern English city of Hull, a serial killer begins to take the lives of sole survivors in the manner they previously cheated death—and shy family man Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy is the only detective who can see the connections.

What is the most important advice you can give to an aspiring crime writer?
Keep at it. I’m afraid to say you will likely be rejected and disappointed many times before your dreams even begin to come true. Write for the enjoyment of it first and keep your secret ambitions of world domination as a private fantasy rather than a definitive goal. It doesn’t happen for everybody, but the pleasure you get from writing is indisputable. More than anything, come up with a good story. It sounds simple, but you’d be amazed how few original tales there are to be told.

What special edge does your former career as a crime reporter bring to your novels?
First and foremost its authenticity. As a journalist I met people at extremes of emotion. I interviewed a lot of grieving families, right when they were at their most raw, and the characters I write about tend to exist in those moments. I know how the room tastes in that particular situation. A lot of the police procedure is research and guesswork, but in terms of the victims’ families and witnesses, I feel able to write with some degree of integrity. Being a journalist also helps you understand that almost anything can happen and everybody is fascinating at some point in their lives.

What’s one book you think everyone should read?
That’s a horrible question! Certainly everybody should read a dictionary, or at least have a glance through one from time to time. From a “greatest novel” perspective, everybody should read something by Cormac McCarthy. Personally, Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks affected me greatly, while I have never shaken the feelings that I was left with after reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved. If we want a better world, everybody should read The Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela. Can I have one more? Read The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes. Oh, and apparently The Dark Winter by David Mark is OK, too.

What’s your favorite movie based on a book?
Well, The Godfather is the greatest ever film and that’s based on a book, but I’m not keen on the book, so that probably doesn’t count. The Shawshank Redemption shows how good a movie can be when the director doesn’t fiddle with the novelist’s vision. Mystic River is also pretty close to perfect as a film. I’m going to have to stop procrastinating, aren’t I? OK, my favorite movie based on a book is No Country for Old Men. It might not be in a few minutes when all of the other movies I’ve neglected start clamoring for my attention, but I’m going to stick with it.

What’s one bad habit you have no intention of breaking?
I swear too much, and I do drink more whisky than any human being (or bull rhinoceros) should really imbibe. I could also beat Mickey Mouse in a cheese-eating contest. I don’t really have any plans to change my ways anytime soon.

What are you working on next?
The second novel in the McAvoy series is completed. It’s called Original Skin and takes McAvoy to some very dark places. I’m busy putting the finishing touches on the third in the series, which is going to be called Sorrow Bound in the UK. I’ve also promised to write my children a novel for Christmas, and they are very hard masters to please so I’m going to have to make sure it’s good. If it’s not, the criticism will not be given gently!

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Gillian Flynn

Interview by Amy Scribner

by Amy Scribner

When Gillian Flynn learned in June that her new novel, Gone Girl, had debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list, it was not exactly a glamorous moment in publishing. “I was in Scottsdale by myself,” Flynn recalls. “I got the phone call while wading in the hotel pool.”

A second chance for a proper celebration came on the Fourth of July, when she found out at home in Chicago that her book had reached the top of the list. “We went out on the back porch—our neighbors are very fond of illegal fireworks, so we popped open champagne and watched,” she says.

Flynn experienced modest success with her first two novels, 2007’s deeply creepy Sharp Objects and 2009’s aptly named Dark Places. But Gone Girl is a bona fide phenomenon, selling 1.8 million copies to date and spending 20 consecutive weeks (so far) on the New York Times bestseller lists, including eight weeks in the number-one spot for hardcover fiction. It’s the word-of-mouth hit that book lovers everywhere have been reading, talking about and gushing over. For these reasons, BookPage has named Gone Girl the Breakout Book of the Year.

Flynn spoke to BookPage from her home in Chicago, still sounding slightly stunned by the book’s astonishing performance.

“I’m smart enough to acknowledge that I’m a good writer, but this is lightning in a bottle.”

“This one’s so different from the other two, just wildly different and incredibly unexpected,” she says. “I thought it would do incrementally better, like the first two. It was thrilling to see it take off like that.”

In Gone Girl we meet Nick and Amy, happy newlyweds living in New York. The inspiration for her parents’ popular series of children’s books, Amy has a healthy trust fund that partly supports their Manhattan life. Then they are both laid off from their magazine jobs, and her parents’ unwise investments drain Amy’s bank account. Nick and Amy move to Missouri to care for his sick mother and start over. After they settle in a gloomy subdivision filled with empty foreclosed homes, the cracks in their marriage quickly appear. Those cracks soon become gaping crevasses, and then Amy disappears, leaving Nick as the prime suspect. But is Amy the golden girl everyone thought she was, or is there something much darker there? And that’s really all you can say about this deliciously strange story without giving away too much.

It’s hard to pinpoint why Gone Girl has captured the popular imagination so thoroughly. It’s perhaps in part because America is still a place where we are most comfortable with women fitting the very specific role of selfless caretaker.

Flynn doesn’t write about that kind of woman.

“I really fight against the idea that we’re natural nurturers,” Flynn says. “It belittles us and our fight to be a good person.”

Flynn is warm and funny on the phone, a far cry from the deeply damaged heroines of her novels. It’s hard to understand how Flynn, who grew up in a happy two-parent home in Kansas City, Missouri, spins such wickedly eerie stories.

“It may be that’s why I’m able to go to those darker spots and always been attracted to that,” Flynn says. “My dad is a film professor and he loved to share movies, particularly with his daughter. I loved to watch horror movies, loved to wander around my house imagining things in the closets. I still remember Dad putting a tape in the big VCR and saying, ‘It’s time to watch Psycho.’”

It seems pretty inevitable, then, that after earning a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern, Flynn would become a writer for Entertainment Weekly. “We were charter subscribers,” she says of her family. “Entertainment Weekly was an iconic thing in our house.”

Flynn worked her way up to TV critic (for the record, she currently is watching “Parks and Recreation,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “Homeland” and “30 Rock,” but maintains that the best TV series of all time is still “The Wire”). When the economy tanked and magazines had to trim budgets, Flynn was among those laid off.

“It gave me the freedom to walk around and feel sorry for myself for a few months,” Flynn says with a laugh. “I spent my days watching movies and playing video games.”

Dark Places came out just months later, though, and Flynn made the transition to full-time novelist. She writes in the “weird little basement area” of the old Victorian house in Chicago she shares with her husband, a lawyer and fellow pop culture junkie, and their toddler son.

Right now, her writing is focused on drafting the Gone Girl screenplay. Reese Witherspoon has signed on to produce and potentially star as Amy. (No word at press time on who will play the handsome but cagey Nick, although Internet opinion seems to lean toward Bradley Cooper or Ryan Gosling.)

With so much of the novel taking place inside Amy’s and Nick’s heads, writing a screenplay is a unique challenge. “I’m trying to find a way to externalize that dialogue,” Flynn says. “I think of Trainspotting, Fight Club and Election—I can’t imagine those without voiceover.”

Once the screenplay is delivered and the publicity for Gone Girl is done, Flynn will have to focus on her next book. She admits to feeling the pressure of what she calls her own “Greek chorus” to produce another runaway bestseller, but tries to focus on the work rather than the result.

“I’m smart enough to acknowledge that I’m a good writer, but this is lightning in a bottle,” she says. “You just do the good work and write what you want to write.”

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