It seems inevitable that Bob Lee Swagger, thriller writer Stephen Hunter’s retired Marine sniper, would one day find a place in the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Swagger isn’t the rumored second gunman, mind you, favored by conspiracy theorists as a more plausible presidential assassin than Lee Harvey Oswald. Quite the contrary; in his latest outing, The Third Bullet, the nation’s top fictional ballistics expert takes his best shot at solving America’s most baffling murder mystery—the assassination that marks its 50th anniversary this year.

As The Third Bullet kicks off, the widow of a prominent thriller writer very much like Hunter tracks Swagger down to his Idaho home to ask him to investigate the death of her husband, who was killed in a late-night hit-and-run that may have had links to the Kennedy assassination. Swagger heads to Dealey Plaza, connects with the JFK conspiracy underground, tracks the author’s killer to Moscow and eventually encounters a CIA operative named Hugh Meachum who provides a shockingly plausible alternate answer to the age-old question: Who killed JFK?

By Hunter’s own admission, The Third Bullet was a tough slog between a mountain of hard evidence and a valley of public doubt about what actually happened on that long-ago Dallas afternoon. To flesh out his storyline, the author immersed himself in the Warren Commission Report, took inventory of the various conspiracy theories, then set off like Swagger for Dealey Plaza to have a look for himself.

Fictional ballistics expert Bob Lee Swagger takes a shot at an age-old question: Who killed JFK?

“What I tried to do from the very beginning was establish hard data points, things that everyone knew and all investigators agreed had happened,” he says. “Then I tried to plot between and around them.”

As he looked down from the famous sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, then sat on the park bench directly below it facing the 90-degree turn that the Kennedy motorcade negotiated before the fatal shot, Hunter’s own hunter’s instinct interceded. The motorcade had slowed to a near-stop for the turn, offering a fish-in-the-barrel shot that even a mediocre marksman like Oswald could have made, compared to the much longer, extremely difficult shot at a moving target as the motorcade pulled away.

“I was stunned,” he recalls. “I looked up and saw the window was about 75 feet away and I thought to myself, good God, why did he not take the easy shot?”

That epiphany unlocked the central mystery of The Third Bullet: If not Oswald, who?

To find a plausible explanation, Hunter recalled a book written by ballistics expert Howard Donahue that theorized Kennedy had been killed by a rogue Secret Service agent shooting from a trailing car.

“It was a thoroughly absurd book and was immediately condemned to purgatory by sentient people, but he understood the science of what happens when a bullet is fired at a man,” Hunter says. In the case of the Kennedy assassination, the third bullet, unlike the previous two, exploded on impact when it hit and killed the president. How could that happen if all three bullets came from the same rifle?

To answer that question, Hunter introduces us to Meachum, a vainglorious Yale-educated veteran of the CIA’s Plans Division with his own secret plans. As frighteningly cold and calculating as Meachum’s story is, Hunter challenged himself by presenting it as excerpts from the man’s diary, his first foray into first-person narrative.

“I wrote that first and I really enjoyed that but there were all kinds of problems,” he admits. “A lot of the effects I get come from cutting and juxtaposing points of view, and it frightened me to get away from those points of view and be stuck in a single head, and yet I found the voice right away. In the end, my problem was shutting Hugh up, not getting him to talk. I discovered a lot of the plotting around Hugh while writing him.”

Hunter, who lives in Baltimore, wrote for the Baltimore Sun for more than 25 years before moving to the Washington Post, where he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for film criticism. He launched the Bob Lee Swagger series in 1993 with Point of Impact, incorporating an encyclopedic knowledge of guns and ballistics, and has gone on to write 17 thrillers.

Did conducting his own investigation into the Kennedy assassination change his view on what happened that dark day in Dallas?

“I suppose I confirmed my suspicions,” Hunter allows. “My theory of the world is that nothing works the way it’s supposed to work, so if anyone argues for perfection, they’re barking up the wrong tree. I wanted my Kennedy assassination conspiracy to be small and adept, but at the same time, mistakes were made, improvisations were made, the whole thing is thrown together on the fly and everybody happens to have a very good day on that day. To me, that was far more realistic than a theory that involves the CIA, Czechoslovakian intelligence and the Mattel toy company and their headquarters is under a volcano. You just don’t believe that.”

Does he agree with Stephen King, who concludes in his JFK speculative novel 11/22/63 that there’s a 99-percent chance Oswald did it?

“That’s how I felt when I started, but now I feel that figure is more like 95 percent,” Hunter says. “There’s a much larger chance than we know that something like [what] I came up with actually happened.”

Murder as a Fine Art takes its inspiration from the real-life, unsolved Ratcliffe Highway murders, two bloody attacks on two separate families in 1811. The gory attacks of random, innocent people threw London into a panic, as the homes of good, law-abiding citizens were no longer safe. Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, dramatized the murders in a postscript to his essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” which depicted the events in gruesome, intimate detail and portrayed the killer as an artistic genius.

In Murder as a Fine Art, it has been over four decades since the Ratcliffe Highway murders, and deep in the heavy fog of London, someone has begun to commit identical murders. The only man who may be able to stop the new killer is De Quincey, who is not only a suspect in the case but also a clear target. With the help of his resourceful daughter Emily, two Scotland Yard detectives and a steady stream of laudanum, De Quincey goes toe-to-toe with an evil history.

Morrell has created an atmospheric, precise murder mystery with fascinating historical detail. Like De Quincey, his work conveys chilling insight into the mind of a serial killer.

During many months of research, you plunged into the world of 1854 London and the works of De Quincey. You’ve called this process “method” writing, which begs the question: Having immersed yourself in this world and De Quincey’s thoughts, what is your own opinion of murder’s artistic value?

Yes, for two years I had the adventure of immersing myself in 1854 London. The only books I read were related to that time, and I so focused on the period that I managed to convince myself I was there. As for murder being a fine art, Thomas De Quincey argued that some killings evoke so much pity and terror in the Aristotelian sense that they become the equivalent of powerful dramas while the killers themselves become imaginative authors. De Quincey’s famous essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” is one of the first examples of psychological criticism. He explored the effect of a text on an audience’s psyche, and he felt that a certain type of murder, one that paralyzes an entire country the way the Ratcliffe Highway murders did, could be analyzed as if it were a play.

“There needs to be something about the theme, the subject, the research and the way the book is written that makes me fuller. That certainly happened with Murder as a Fine Art.”

One of the most powerful questions in historical fiction is “What if?” When you were researching this novel, which “What if?” were you most excited to explore?

There were a string of “What ifs,” all of them related. A brief reference to De Quincey in a recent movie about Darwin, Creation, made me curious enough to look at some Victorian literature texts that I still have from my college days. My professor hadn’t said much about De Quincey, but now, as I read De Quincey’s work, I became increasingly excited by his brilliance. Then I found his Postscript to “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” which was published in the fall of 1854, and I suddenly thought—I’m not exaggerating about the cascading way this came together—“What if De Quincey came to London in 1854 to publicize his essay? What if someone used that essay as a blueprint for replicating the Ratcliffe Highway murders? What if De Quincey became the logical suspect because of his opium addiction and his obsession about the murders?” Of course, it took two years of research and writing in order to dramatize those questions.

De Quincey suggested that the artistic brilliance of the Ratcliffe Highway murders would raise the aesthetic bar for future murders. Would you call De Quincey the father of the mystery novel? Would you go so far as to call him the father of the modern murder? Why or why not?

We know that De Quincey strongly influenced Edgar Allan Poe, who is generally considered to be the inventor of the detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poe then influenced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the creation of Sherlock Holmes. So if De Quincey isn’t the father of the detective mystery genre, he can justly be called the grandfather of it.

Between Poe and Conan Doyle, there’s Wilkie Collins, whose The Moonstone is usually called the first detective novel as opposed to the detective short stories of Poe. In The Moonstone, Collins uses De Quincey and his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater to solve the mystery, so De Quincey certainly had an effect on the genre. At the same time, De Quincey was also one of the originators of Sensation Fiction, which is what we now call thrillers. When I saw the pattern, I realized that De Quincey would make a perfect detective. We can trace a line from Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lector all the way back to De Quincey’s influence on crime fiction.

De Quincey is best remembered for his addiction to laudanum, a painkilling mixture of opium and alcohol, as memorialized by his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. In Murder as a Fine Art, his addiction is clearly killing him. However, it helped him write beautifully, and in this novel, it makes him a formidable opponent to the murderer. Parallels to Sherlock Holmes must be drawn. Why are drugs a classic element of mysteries?

Laudanum was as common in Victorian medicine cabinets as aspirin is today. It was used for baby colic, back pain, kidney ailments, menstrual cramps, cancer, hay fever—just about anything. It had a skull and crossbones on the bottle, along with a label marked “POISON.” Arguably, many Victorians were drug addicts without realizing it, which explains the dark, muffled rooms of the period. A tablespoon of laudanum would probably be lethal. But De Quincey sometimes drank 16 ounces of the stuff each day. For him it worked as a stimulant rather than a sedative, and under its influence, he wrote amazingly evocative, brilliant prose.

Lest someone decide that this is the key to being a wonderful writer, I should add that De Quincey suffered opium nightmares that made him feel that he endured the horrors of 100 years each night. His stomach and bowels shut down. He had massive debts because he spent so much money on opium.

It’s interesting to note that Sherlock Holmes injects himself with a seven percent solution of cocaine. Wilkie Collins was a prisoner of laudanum. Poe claimed to have tried to commit suicide by using laudanum. His narrators sometimes use laudanum, lending a distinctive tone to the prose. But I don’t see an epidemic of drug-affected detectives after the Victorian era ended.

While drug use plays a role in this book, the roots of the problem are British imperialism, the wars waged in the name of colonialism and the British East India Company’s opium trade. The shady opium dealings detailed in Murder as a Fine Art force the reader to question who really is to blame—and whether or not the murderer is validated in his actions. As deplorable as the opium trade was, was it bad enough to justify murder? Can murder this gruesome ever be validated?

Now we get to the central theme of the novel. Because of De Quincey’s opium addiction, the plot pivots around that drug. The concept of physical and mental addiction wasn’t understood for much of the Victorian era. They thought of it as a habit that could be overcome by fortitude. The British East India Company, which was powerful enough to lend money to the British government to finance wars, made most of its money from opium. Some of that opium was shipped home to England (along with opium from Turkey). But much of it was smuggled into China (the emperor didn’t want it in his country) in exchange for Chinese tea, which was more valuable than opium on the international market. Huge fortunes were made in this way. Many universities (including American Ivy league ones) have endowments that started with donations of opium profits. The murderer in my novel isn’t a sociopathic maniac. Without giving away a major twist in the plot, I think it’s safe to say that he’s extremely sympathetic, which is an odd thing to say about a mass murderer, even a fictional one, but given his experiences, his torment seemed heartbreaking.

Throughout Murder as a Fine Art, characters are unable to escape their pasts: De Quincey is haunted by memories on every corner of London; an Irish cop tries to hide his red hair; the killer’s motivations come from secrets in his past; horrifying murders are repeated. How inescapable is our past?

The burden of the past—how we can’t escape our origins—is certainly one aspect of the novel. My own past had nightmarish aspects. After my father died in combat, my mother couldn’t raise me by herself and put me in an orphanage. Later she reclaimed me, although I sometimes felt I was adopted without being told. After she remarried, it turned out that my stepfather disliked children. There were constant terrifying arguments between my mother and him. Fearful, I used to sleep beneath my bed. I went to sleep, telling stories to myself. I’m still telling those stories.

The challenge is to overcome the imperfection of our past. In Murder as a Fine Art, the murderer is as much controlled by his childhood as De Quincey is.

This historical thriller is certainly a departure for you. You took real characters, true works and actual events, but went further: Murder as a Fine Art doesn’t simply recreate the original murders, but even extrapolates theories and solves the original crime altogether. Without giving too much away, do you truly believe you solved it, or did you make fictional leaps in your conclusion?

My solution to the motives for the 1811 Ratcliffe Highway mass murders is consistent with the information that’s available about them. The detail that almost no one addressed is that in the second set of killings, the supposed murderer John Williams killed a tavern-keeper named John Williamson. When I first read this, I thought it was a typo. I’m aware of only one commentator, G.K. Chesterton, who thought that this was weird. “It sounds like a sort of infanticide,” Chesterton said. Because my novel’s main character, Thomas De Quincey, invented the term “subconscious” and anticipated Freud’s theories by more than half a century, I decided that the psychological implication of Williams killing Williamson would provide the explanation for not only that set of killings but the ones that occurred 12 days earlier. I can’t suggest that mine is the only explanation, but my solution is logical and fits the details.

In the book’s afterword, you call Murder as a Fine Art “[your] version of a nineteenth-century novel.” How was writing in this 19th-century style different from crafting your other novels?

Flaubert, Henry James and Hemingway are three authors who drastically changed the way novels came to be written, largely due to their development of the third-person limited viewpoint. Before them, novels tended to be written in an omniscient third-person historian’s voice or else in the first person. The omniscient voice is almost never used these days.  It relies on telling, not showing. Its narrator can be intrusive. It’s so different from the third-person limited viewpoint that these days it draws attention to itself, even though it once was taken for granted. In Bleak House, which Dickens released in 1853, a year before the events in Murder as a Fine Art, he alternates an omniscient viewpoint with a first-person viewpoint. All of this would now probably be rejected in a creative writing class. But I decided that because my novel is set in 1854, it needed to be written in a way that evoked 1854. I needed to make it a modern version of a Victorian novel.

The other thing I realized was that for me the omniscient viewpoint was essential because 1854 London is as foreign to us as Mars. The things that Victorians took for granted are so weird that they need to be explained. What’s a dollymop or a dipper? How much did a respectable woman’s clothes weigh? (Thirty-seven pounds.) Why could physicians be presented at the queen’s court while surgeons were restricted? Why did prison cells have boxes with cranks on the walls? I couldn’t have the characters talking about these things, which they took for granted and would never think about discussing. The only way I knew to solve the problem was to use a Victorian omniscient narrator, who periodically steps forward and in effect says to the reader, “You can’t understand this scene unless I tell you about Victorian burial customs.” It’s a liberating technique that made Murder as a Fine Art a great pleasure to write because by definition the third-person limited viewpoint is limiting.

Where do you hope this book will take you as an author?

My goal has always been to keep moving forward and find new ways to write about action and suspense. A few people were surprised when they learned that I’d done the unexpected and written a Victorian thriller, but it’s very much in keeping with my attitudes. Before I start a project, I write a letter to myself, answering this question: “Why is this book worth a year or two or three of my life?” There needs to be something about the theme, the subject, the research and the way the book is written that makes me fuller. That certainly happened with Murder as a Fine Art. By going to Victorian London, I moved ahead personally and saw the world in a different way. Response to the book has been very encouraging, with numerous requests for me to do another De Quincey novel. I’ve written very few sequels, but in this case, I have much more to say about this remarkable man.

Richard Crompton’s debut mystery novel, Hour of the Red God, is “character-driven from the get-go” according to our Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney. Crompton introduces Maasai protagonist Detective Mollel, who is “outwardly ritually scarred, inwardly emotionally scarred and always a bit at odds with fellow cops.”

We chatted with Crompton about the fascinating Nairobi setting, Detective Mollel and more in a 7 questions interview.

Describe your book in one sentence.
A gritty thriller and a vivid portrait of a city on the edge.

What do you think readers will most like about Detective Mollel?
He combines two very different worlds. Raised in the tribal Maasai heritage and translocated to the modern city, he feels at home in neither. But his sense of family, duty and justice ring true across all cultures.

Why does Nairobi make for such a compelling mystery setting?
It’s a city of contrasts. Sky-scrapers and slums. Wealth, poverty, corruption and ethnic tension. The police force is strained to its limits. This, however, works for the mystery writer. Instead of relying on high-tech solutions, it’s back-to-basics detective work which will ultimately prevail.

What’s one book you think everyone should read?
1984.

Would you make a good detective?
No. Real-life crime is usually casual, cruel and random. As a writer I would be looking for patterns and motives which do not exist.

Your website’s header states, “Anyone who says they enjoy writing is not trying hard enough.” What does that mean to you?
I want my books to be simple, elegant and effortless to read. The craft of writing is to make the writer invisible. It takes a lot of effort to learn how to disappear.

What’s next?
The sequel, Hell’s Gate. I am also writing a novel set between London and Africa, which is becoming a kind of homage to Bleak House. And my kids are insisting I write a book for them—which fills me with dread, as they’re my toughest critics.

Ingrid Thoft's debut thriller, Loyalty, introduces P.I. Fina Ludlow, a fearless pursuer of the truth and somewhat outcast member of a truly dysfuctional (and very powerful) family. When her brother's wife goes missing, the Ludlows call in Fina's special talents to crack the case—but her search digs deep and tests those familial bonds.

Thoft's research into the world of private investigation led her to attend and graduate from the University of Washington P.I. program. This unique insight makes Loyalty all the more realistic and more thrilling. We chatted with Thoft about P.I. school, her femme fatale Fina and more.

Why did you decide to attend and graduate from a certificate program in private investigation? Do many authors go so far in their research? Does it give you an edge?

Before writing Loyalty, I was working on a series that featured an amateur sleuth. As much as I loved writing that character, I felt limited by her amateur status. I decided to create a professional private investigator but needed to learn the rules of private investigation before my character broke some of them! Fina makes her own rules, but does so knowingly, not because she’s incompetent. The University of Washington had recently started their certificate program in private investigation, so I enrolled and learned the tricks of the trade. There were no other writers in the class, but I highly recommend that kind of research. It gave me a good understanding of the profession, and it was lots of fun!

What's the coolest thing you learned in the P.I. program?

One of the cases that stands out was part of a presentation done by a scientist from the Washington State Police crime lab. She discussed trace evidence and the idea that we all leave things behind wherever we’ve been and pick something up from that location as well, whether it’s fiber, hair or residue of some sort. Her example was ash from the Mount St. Helen’s eruption. The ash that was deposited into a suspect’s car filter could only have come from a particular place at a particular time. Suspects can be fastidious and cunning, but you can’t outsmart Mother Nature!

Do you ever use your P.I. skills in daily life—either intentionally or unintentionally?

I think that both good P.I.s and writers are observant and aware of their surroundings. They use those skills for different purposes, but the ability to have an open mind and take in a variety of information is an asset in both lines of work. In particular, the certificate program educated me about the online resources that exist for gathering information—things like property ownership and criminal records. I’ve been known to do a little digging, but nothing illegal. Two of the random tips I heed to this day are to walk in crosswalks (if you’re hit by a car you’ll have a stronger lawsuit) and to avoid driving in front of tractor trailer trucks. According to an accident reconstructionist who spoke, approximately 50% have faulty brakes. Yikes!  

"I’ve been known to do a little digging, but nothing illegal."

Do you possess the attributes of a great P.I.? Would you make a good P.I. if you had to give up writing?

I possess some of the necessary skills: I’m observant, organized and comfortable talking with people from all walks of life, but I’m not a thrill seeker and definitely not as brave as Fina. I think I would make a solid P.I., but I would never enjoy it as much as writing, so here’s hoping this works out!

Fina is one fearless girl in a male-dominated world. What do you think readers will like most about her?

I think her courage—both physical and in terms of standing up for her beliefs—appeals to readers. Fina says what many of us think and lives her life boldly, if recklessly, at times. But for all of her bravery, she is vulnerable when it comes to the people she loves and anyone she perceives as being an underdog. She doesn’t pretend that she always knows the best course of action or the right answer, but she muddles through and makes the best decision possible, and I think readers can relate to this. In general, people try to do the best they can, and that’s what she does in her own uniquely, imperfect way.

Fina’s walking a fine line between loyalty to her family and doing the right thing. How is she able to navigate that line? How do you approach that line in your own life?

She doesn’t always navigate it gracefully; she checks in with herself often to determine what she can live with and what decisions would keep her up at night. Although Fina massages the truth when it suits her, she’s very honest with herself. There are some things she can’t tolerate, and she’d rather suffer the consequences than keep certain secrets or abet certain behaviors. For her, it’s a matter of identifying the lesser of two evils.

In terms of my own life, thank goodness my family has never made demands on me that require a crisis of conscience! I was definitely raised to value making a good choice versus upholding the status quo or going along with the crowd. Fina and I both believe that there’s no comfort in numbers if you aren’t happy with yourself.

Boston reveals a seedy underbelly in Loyalty, with mobsters and madams running the show. Why is Boston such a great setting for these dark deeds?

Boston offers writers so many opportunities for creating layered, interesting characters who inhabit various mini worlds. There’s the city’s history, its blue-blood roots, ethnic neighborhoods with their strong ethnic pride, medicine, technology, the arts, higher education and even professional sports. These are wonderful pools to dip into and from them, a writer can populate a story with a variety of characters who realistically may pass one another on any given day on the city streets. The city is rich with possibility.

What do you know about writing now that you didn’t know before publishing your first novel?

I don’t think I appreciated how much work goes into the publication of a novel before witnessing that process first-hand. So many people are involved at every stage, working incredibly hard to make the book as good as it can be and working to connect readers with it.

And I finally understand why books have typos! I used to wonder, as a reader, how misprints would slip by in the publication process, but I totally get it; after reading your own book a dozen times, your eyes glaze over! That’s why it’s important to have lots of eyes on the page. Hopefully, someone else will catch the errors I missed.

What’s next for Fina?

Fina’s next big case finds her embroiled in an investigation that poses new complicated questions: What makes you who you are? Are you defined by what you have or what you’re lacking? She grapples with these issues, and of course, the Ludlows continue to complicate her life. But she still has fun and doesn’t shy away from a fight. There’s never a dull moment with Fina.

David Gordon’s uproarious, clever Mystery Girl is our Top Pick in Mystery for August 2013. It’s a fun blend of literary and cinematic references with nods to classic detective fiction, as well as some “Woody Allen-esque” humor to keep it all rolling. In a 7 questions interview with Gordon, we talked about writing, great movies and more.

Describe your book in one sentence.
In an effort to win back his wife, failed novelist Sam Kornberg becomes assistant to a brilliant and bizarre detective who sends him to trail a mysterious woman, and ends up stumbling into a plot involving murder, madness, Satanists, Mexican shootouts, video store geeks and the mysteries of love and literature.

Sam Kornberg and Solar Lonsky are quite the pair: Sam’s a bit of a mess, and Solar is house-bound. What makes them a good team?
Each one has strengths and weaknesses that can help the other. Lonsky is not only house-bound; he is trapped in his own formidable mind, and Sam is a connection to a more human if messy world. Sam, as you say, is a mess—or at least his life is at the moment—and Lonsky becomes the guide who leads him through the crisis to the other side.

“I think there’s something very beautiful and exciting about THE FORM, the sense of an unfolding mystery.”

What do you love about writing mysteries?
The same thing I love about reading them. [[I just love the form.]] I think there’s something very beautiful and exciting about THE FORM, the sense of an unfolding mystery. Constructing the solutions is a lot harder than reading them though.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve received?
The best advice for me has been practical: Have an envelope (this was pre-Internet!) stamped and ready to send rejected work right back out. Have a regular writing schedule and stick to it. Sit there even if I don’t write a word. Know what I am going to write tomorrow so I don’t get stuck. And, from an older friend, the assurance that all my personal misadventures and disasters would just end up as funny stuff to write about.

What book are you embarrassed to have not read?
Anna Karenina—I keep saving it for the big vacation that never comes.

What’s your favorite movie based on a book?
An impossible question. I could spend a week making lists. My favorites are great films that tackle great books by creating something new, like The Shining, Naked Lunch, Lolita, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex. I could also be sneaky and say my favorite is the new Japanese movie based on my book The Serialist. But that’s cheating.

What’s next?
I am working on a story collection with my editor, which is really exciting. It covers all sorts of genres, styles and subjects. Also I just started a new novel. I can’t say what it is about yet, but my goal is funnier, sadder, more beautiful and more thrilling. And more disturbing.