Peter Robinson's absorbing new novel, Children of the Revolution, is our April Top Pick in Mystery! In his 21st novel to feature Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, the 30-year veteran launches into a sensitive investigation of a former teacher's death, which may be linked to his checkered past and sexual misconduct with one of his students. Amid the details of the case, Banks is facing new career choices: Does he accept a paperwork-heavy promotion, or risk being superannuated in his more comfortable position?

In a 7 questions interview, Robinson shares his thoughts on keeping his beloved character fresh, the Inspector Banks television series and more.

Describe your book in one sentence.
A disgraced college teacher is found dead, and when Banks’ investigation leads him to suspect the man’s radical past might play a part, he begins to encounter opposition from powerful and privileged establishment figures.

This is your 21st novel to feature DCI Banks. Do you still discover new things you love about his character?
That’s what keeps me going. I try to find something new about Banks, however minor, in each book. In Watching the Dark, for example, I discovered that he had a bit of a cruel streak by the way he played practical jokes on one of the characters. In Children of the Revolution he even surprises himself by some of his actions, but telling would be giving too much away!

Where do you do most of your writing?
While I do a lot of writing in my study in Toronto and work steadily when I’m over in Yorkshire, perhaps the place I get most done is a lake house in Northern Ontario. There are no distractions except a beautiful view, and I get about twice as much writing done there as I would during the same time in the city.

Do you have any unique writing rituals?
No, I just plunge right in. It’s easy to develop tools for procrastination, like entering the cold water slowly and feeling the chill creep up your legs. Best to dive right in and immerse yourself. You soon get used to it. I don’t require any weird objects on my desk or lucky charms to wear. Well, I do have a tiny skull made of jet on my desk.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
The Wind in the Willows.

Your Inspector Banks series has recently been adapted for television. Have you been a regular viewer?
I have seen all the episodes, and I must say I think Stephen Tompkinson is doing a great job in the title role. The rest of the cast is terrific, too. I do find the adaptations have diverged quite a bit from the books lately, but the result has probably been even better television programmes!

What are you working on next?
The 22nd DCI Banks book, called Abattoir Blues after a Nick Cave song. The title will probably be changed in the U.S., as “abattoir” is not a word you use, I’m told. I’ll probably call it Slaughterhouse Six! Anyway, my publishers weren’t too thrilled when I told them it was about a stolen tractor, but when I mentioned the bloodstained hangar, the burning caravan and the body parts, their ears perked up a bit.

In a meteoric career that has produced two series and 13 crime novels in as many years, Georgia native Karin Slaughter rocketed to international bestseller status by granting women their rightful place at murder scenes and morgues.

Yet while her growing fan base eagerly awaits each new installment of her Atlanta series featuring Georgia Bureau of Investigation special agent Will Trent (Triptych, Fractured, Broken) and its country cousin starring Grant County medical examiner Sara Linton (Faithless, Indelible, Blindsighted), the restless Slaughter has kept busy crafting her new novel, exploring time travel—and bracing herself for space flight.

What!? Time travel? Space flight? Whose genre is this, anyway?

Slaughter admits her unquenchable thirst to break new ground has prompted a mid-career interest in exploring neighboring galaxies, literary and otherwise.

How did a small-town Southern girl wind up doing weightless somersaults aboard the infamous suborbital “vomit comet,” much less set her sights on a future space flight aboard the Virgin Galactic?

More about that later, though in a way, the process accelerated with Cop Town, her first standalone novel, which takes place back in mid-1970s Atlanta when cops were men and women weren’t welcome. Slaughter first wrote about the period in Criminal (2012), in which she united characters from her two series.

“I had so much fun that I wanted to visit that time period again,” she explains.

Just one problem: “I couldn’t come up with a good reason to put my characters Will and Sara back there, mainly because they would have been children then,” she says. Slaughter herself was only 3 years old at the time.

So she created two very different protagonists: veteran patrolwoman Maggie Lawson, whose brother and uncle are part of the all-male good-ol’-boy network on the Atlanta force, and her new rookie partner Kate Murphy, a Jewish neophyte from a privileged background whose husband was killed in Vietnam. Together, they battle the blatant racism, sexism and cultural ostracism of the day, while working their way into the search for a serial killer who is targeting their ranks.

Slaughter called upon the best possible resource to bring her characters to life.

“I talked to six female police officers who are now retired and in their 60s. If you want to get the truth about something, talk to a 60-year-old retired woman!” she chuckles.

“I thought it would be really interesting to explore the lives of patrol officers, because that’s something I haven’t really done before; normally, they’re detectives. And because there was so little structure to Atlanta policing at the time, a lot of patrol officers did detective work. Sometimes they had to, because the detectives were passed out drunk in their cars. Honestly, that was a real problem!”

To prepare for her immersion into the disco era, Slaughter chose her bedside reading accordingly.

“One of the books I was reading while working on Cop Town was Fear of Flying by Erica Jong,” she says. “Reading it now, this line stuck out to me: ‘An unmarried woman is taking a vow of poverty.’ And for a lot of women today, that’s true. When you combine households and you have someone—a spouse or partner—it makes things easier. If you look at the number of single mothers who are trapped in poverty, it really resonated for me.”

So did the changes America was facing back then.

“It definitely mirrors what we’re going through today: coming out of a very disastrous war, the economy was in the toilet, women’s pay equality, homophobia, racism. It’s easier to talk about these things in the past, because if you talk about them in the present, then you’re kind of a whiny bitch. But if you say, hey, look how bad it was in the ’70s, then you can let people draw their own conclusions,” she says.

She was shocked to hear first-hand accounts of the outright sexism of the day, which was slowly crumbling, in large part due to federal intervention.

“It was a huge change, and like any change, most of the guys didn’t want it to happen,” she says. “In Atlanta, they were also dealing with the fact that the good-ol’-boy network wasn’t white anymore; it was black, and [women] were excluded from it. As Maggie says in the book, ‘The good-ol’-boy network is fine as long as you’re one of the good old boys.’ They didn’t like being left out.”

Why did the women pursue crime fighting? “I asked every woman I talked to why they did it when no one wanted them to, and every single one of them said they did it because someone told them they shouldn’t,” Slaughter says.

A similar instinct may have inspired the author’s interest in space flight. How in the world did she wind up on the vomit comet?

“I was talking to the people at Virgin Galactic about doing the space flight, but my dad said I would have to let a hundred people go up before I go up,” she chuckles. “But one of the things they sponsored was letting us go on the vomit comet. It was really wonderful! If you plan to do it, do it with somebody you know or make friends with somebody, because you can do stuff together in weightlessness, roll people in circles and all that. I had a really great time.”

Slaughter hopes to not only go up in space, but back to the future as well with sequels to Cop Town.

“Maybe every two or three [series] books, I could do one of these, and maybe take Kate and Maggie into the Atlanta child murders in the late ’70s,” she says. “A lot of women worked on the Atlanta child murders. Although they were still plainclothes officers at that point and weren’t really called detectives, they were given what were called ‘vagina crimes,’ so if it came into or went out of a vagina, a woman was the investigator.” After a series of child murders terrified the city, “Women were the ones who started to put the pieces together, and then, of course, the men said, ‘Oh, we need to take this over because it’s a serial killer.’”

Would she one day take the leap into that final frontier, science fiction?

“Oh yeah, absolutely,” she readily admits. “The Centers for Disease Control are right up the street from me, and my neighbors are doctors there, so I’d like to do something, maybe about a virus and some horrible mishap happens. I’d love to do that.”

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Antonio Hill follows up his Spanish sun-soaked crime debut The Summer of Dead Toys with his second Inspector Salgado mystery, The Good Suicides. A cryptic and unnerving message is sent to a select group of managers at a cosmetics company: a horrifying photo of dogs hanging from a tree accompanied by the line, "Never forget." Soon, those on the receiving end of the email begin committing suicide in grotesquely creative ways, and the rattled Salgado is thrust into the investigation.

We caught up with Hill and chatted about Barcelona's best (and not-so-great) qualities, his work in literary translation and more in a 7 questions interview.

Describe your book in one sentence.
After a woman in her 30s jumps in front of a subway train, Inspector Héctor Salgado will discover that one of her colleagues killed his own family and himself not long ago; besides their tragic deaths, working in the same company is the only thing both people have in common. . . .

What do you love most about Inspector Héctor Salgado?
There are a few things in Héctor that I like. For one, he’s stubborn—in the good sense of the word. He never gives up, and not only because he’s paid for doing the job. He is very sensitive to the idea of truth. Justice cannot always be achieved, but at least, for him, we owe the victims the effort of finding the truth and exposing it to the light. He is a good friend and tries to be a decent father, although he knows he’s far from being perfect. But for me, even his bad temper is becoming a good quality now that he’s learning to manage that anger in a positive way.

Both of your novels have been set in Barcelona. What makes Barcelona such a good location for a mystery?
Barcelona is a great location for any sort of story, but it’s been especially [great] in crime fiction, and I can’t explain it. In my case, I wanted to portray a city I love deeply with all its contradictions: Barcelona can be charming and elusive at the same time, and its biggest ambition—to stand out from Madrid, the capital of Spain—has made it a cosmopolitan place. It is perhaps the most “European” of all Spanish cities, but little by little the city has forgotten the needs of its real inhabitants and decided to show the world only a beautiful, modern and sunny façade. The fact that I used a cosmetics lab as a setting in The Good Suicides has something to do with that false idea of beauty that the city tries to project.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
The good thing about reading is that you can choose from millions of books. But if I had to name one or two, I’d pick up To Kill a Mockingbird and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

You have translated a great deal of acclaimed literary fiction from authors such as David Sedaris and Jonathan Safran Foer. What do you enjoy most about translation? 
There is something voyeuristic in translation. You get to know an author’s work even better than him/herself sometimes, [if] only because you have to deconstruct every sentence in order to write it again in a foreign language and, at the same time, keep the rhythm of the prose. It is very hard work and not always appreciated enough by readers and publishers.

What’s at the top of your summer reading list right now?
John Connolly. I cannot wait to read his last novel published in Spain: The Wrath of Angels.

What are you working on next?
I have just finished the third Salgado novel, Los Amantes de Hiroshima, and I plan to take a real break for a couple of months.

Author photo by Jaume Recoder

Agatha Christie's grandson, Mathew Prichard (left), gives the family seal of approval to the new Poirot mystery by writer Sophie Hannah (right).

Question: How does one possibly attempt to add to the crime canon of Agatha Christie, whose 80 mystery novels and short story collections have sold more than two billion copies, trailing only the Bible and her countryman William Shakespeare?

Answer: Very. Very. Carefully.

In fact, since Christie’s death in 1976, Mathew Prichard, the only child of the only child of the queen of crime fiction, who has overseen her literary estate for decades, was dead set against the idea of any author attempting a Christie continuation novel.

But through “a very happy string of coincidences,” the literary world—including those diehard Christie enthusiasts who were “a bit nervous” about the prospect—is poised to fall in love with Dame Agatha all over again, thanks to The Monogram Murders, a darkly twisted new Hercule Poirot mystery crafted by best-selling psychological thriller writer Sophie Hannah (Kind of Cruel).

The Monogram Murders transports us to a coffeehouse in 1920s London, where the idiosyncratic Belgian detective’s supper has been interrupted by a woman who fears for her life. Poirot soon learns why: Three guests at a nearby hotel have been murdered by poison and carefully laid out with a single monogrammed cufflink tucked in their mouths. With Scotland Yard investigating officer and doubting-Thomas apprentice Edward Catchpool at his side, Poirot once again calls upon his “little grey cells” to suss the meaning of every delicious twist in the bizarre case.

Noted suspense writer Sophie Hannah puts her own spin on Christie's quirky Belgian crime-solver, Hercule Poirot.

Throughout, Hannah’s pitch- perfect dialogue and mastery of misdirection combine to weave a tangled tapestry that delights with its period detail, flashes of humor and grim glimpses into our darker nature.

The novel’s birth took an equally circuitous course, dating back several years to when Prichard was editing his grandmother’s letters and photographs for The Grand Tour, a travelogue of Christie’s 1922 yearlong tour of the British Empire.

“I suppose that editing those wonderful, charming letters of my grandmother that had never been published before drew my attention back and did have the effect of thinking about Agatha Christie anew,” he admits.

Slowly, his resolve against authorizing further works under the Christie imprimatur gave way to the realities of modern publishing.

“Our advice was that if we took our courage in both hands and allowed a new Poirot to be written and published, one of the big spinoffs would be a renewal of interest in the real Poirot books,” Prichard says. “So I think in some ways, this is a double event. Obviously, the publication of a new Poirot by Sophie Hannah is an event all on its own, but we also hope it will help renew interest in the real Poirot stories.”

As luck would have it, Hannah’s agent was speaking over lunch with a HarperCollins representative who mentioned in passing that the Christie estate was mulling over a continuation project.

“My agent knew I’d had a couple ideas in mind that I’d always thought of as Agatha Christie-ish, but I’d never quite gotten them to work in my regular titles,” says Hannah. “So when my agent suggested that I write a historical, that’s what won me.”

The happenstance sent Hannah back to the Christie collection that had inspired her own career trajectory. She knew she wanted to set half the book in London, the other half in a rural English village, with Poirot on the case rather than Christie’s venerable Miss Marple.

Prichard could not have been happier with the results.

“I think it’s her portrait of Poirot that is certainly one of my favorite parts of the book,” he says. “I think Sophie got Poirot exactly right; there is the humanity, the flashes of humor—and maybe, although she might deny this, even the occasional moment of irritation, which I think is very much a part of Poirot. Her great sensitivity to the various settings in the book, the hotel and the towns outside of London, are very like Agatha Christie. But some of my favorite bits are pure Sophie Hannah as well.”

The process of re-reading the Christie novels to prepare for the daunting task of filling the shoes of the queen of crime fiction left Hannah a changed person.

“It definitely made me realize afresh what a brilliant writer she is, and it helped change my attitude toward my own life,” she says. “If you do something very different from what you usually do, when you go back to what you usually do, you think about it more consciously. It’s been really good in that sense.”

One question weighs on everyone’s mind: Is the world ready for more Agatha Christie?

“We have promised ourselves to give the first one time to get launched and get a reaction, not only from critics but from the real fans as well, before making up our minds on what we’re going to do,” Prichard explains. “It would surprise me if, occasionally, we didn’t do something like this again, but don’t worry; it won’t be every year or anything like that. I don’t think that would be right.”

How would his famous grandmother have felt about The Monogram Murders?

“My grandmother was a very intelligent person, and I think if you had asked her five years ago whether she wanted someone to write more Poirot stories, she would unquestionably have said no,” Prichard admits. “But if you had told her that if she wanted to prolong the enjoyment that her readers still have for the stories she herself wrote, and that one of the modern ways of doing this was to publish a new version of her character by somebody who is a great fan and admirer of hers, I think that at the very least she would have understood the reasoning.”

So, somewhere Dame Agatha is smiling?

“I’m sure she’s doing that,” he chuckles. “She was very good at smiling.”

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.