Mystery & Suspense Archives | Page 30 of 119 | BookPage

Behind the Book by Tim Green

by Tim Green

It’s been a decade since I wrote my first legal thriller. Like many authors, I was caught in the updraft of John Grisham and Scott Turrow. The Letter of the Law was the first novel I’d written that became a bestseller, and it changed my career. Since my first legal thriller—a story about Casey Jordan, a tough, resourceful female lawyer—was the catalyst that propelled me to a new level as a writer, my editor thought revisiting that character might prove itself again. I’ve done that with my last two books, Above the Law and now False Convictions.

As I did when I first wrote about Casey Jordan in The Letter of the Law, I went to my wife for inspiration. I needed a story that would entertain and inspire. Since my main character was a woman, I needed a woman’s perspective. But I also needed a subject rooted in the legal system, a subject that anyone could relate to, and that also carried with it the weight of life or death. My search began with a simple conversation about the law, about crime and punishment.

My wife has an uncompromising view of the justice system: if someone is guilty, he should be punished. The death penalty? Well, that’s okay, too. Some crimes are so bad they deserve the death penalty, if the person really did it.

There’s the rub.

“But how do you ever know that for certain?” I ask.

“Well,” she says, “just in the cases where you really know, like someone saw them do it or something, or if they get the DNA. Those people should never get off.”

While I agree with her ultimate goal, the lawyer in me argues about her certainty.

“What if the witness is lying?” I ask.

“DNA and a witness,” she says. “That’s proof.”

And a great setup for a thriller.

The O.J. Simpson trial first opened the public’s mind to the possibility of corrupted DNA, throwing back the curtain on the magic of science. The defense brilliantly called into question the validity of the processes and the people who give us the 13 matching loci that constitute a match with a billion-to-one certainty.

When we think about human manipulation, so many things become possible, and the switch between right and wrong is easily flipped. Of course, those with the power or the opportunity to flip that switch need motivation. For the rich and powerful, it’s often greed that motivates them and money that fuels their mission.

We regularly hear about prisoners who’ve spent 20 years or more in jail being set free. The mechanism is DNA testing where physical proof directly refutes the evidence that led to their conviction. Many times these people were unjustly convicted by witnesses who, for one reason or another, lied or were mistaken. The DNA may have been taken from the murder weapon, some matter on the victim’s clothes or person, or some other object from the scene of the crime, proving that it was someone else who committed the act instead of the convicted prisoner.

Twists and turns drive suspense novels to make the story fast-paced and hard to put down. The obvious is a story about a lawyer working hard to overturn an unjust conviction in order to free an innocent man from nearly two decades of imprisonment. We’ve seen thousands of those.

As a writer, I can turn up the heat by giving reasons why other people would want the accused to pay for the crime instead of the real criminal. And I can create a close-knit, politically charged small town where nearly everyone will present an obstacle to the lawyer because she is a mistrusted outsider. However, the real twist comes from the unexpected, from challenging people’s perceptions of reality: can a smudge of matter from 20 years ago prove guilt or innocence? And, if it can, how can we know for certain that the smudge is what someone says it is? Where did the smudge come from and how do we know?

I love that DNA can free men wrongly imprisoned for decades. I’m hungry to lock up murderers, rapists and pedophiles and throw away the keys and know that modern forensic science can help. Still, at the end of the day, contrary to my wife’s wishes—even with the power of DNA—the ultimate arbiters are imperfect humans. The guilty don’t always get the punishment they deserve and the innocent don’t always go free.

A former lawyer and pro football player, Tim Green is the author of several legal thrillers, a memoir and a children’s chapter book series. When he’s not writing, he is hosting the ABC show “Find My Family” or spending time with his wife and five children at home in upstate New York. You can find more information on his website.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Mining the fields of memory

Behind the Book by William Brodrick

by William Brodrick

My first novel, The Sixth Lamentation, deals with two time frames. The first presents the exploits of a group of Catholic students in Paris during the Nazi occupation of World War II. They call themselves The Round Table and smuggle Jewish children to a monastery in Burgundy. The students are betrayed, and only one person survives Agnes Aubret. The second time frame begins 50 years later. Agnes, now living in England, learns that she will soon die from a terminal illness. This terrible revelation comes on the same day that the German officer responsible for the fate of her compatriots is exposed hiding in a Gilbertine Priory. In due course a war crimes trial begins, and Agnes will either die vanquished or vindicated. The legal process flounders, however; there are secrets the participants will not reveal. Father Anselm, a monk in the community where the German officer sought refuge, is compelled to unravel the moral complexity of the past and bring an unexpected moment of redemption to Agnes before she dies.

It is perhaps a truism to state that a first novel is often a plundering of one’s past. This is certainly true of me, although the fields of memory I explored were not restricted to my own. In 1942 my mother was arrested by the Gestapo while smuggling a Jewish infant out of Amsterdam. The child was taken away and my mother was imprisoned. She survived the war; the child almost certainly did not. I had always been struck by the unimaginable antecedents to this dreadful incident: the anguish of the parents; the comprehensive nature of the Nazi project; and the need for extraordinary heroism from ordinary people in impossible circumstances. Thus, before I had any sense of the novel’s content, I pictured a group of students with their faces set against the times: a Round Table of chivalry in a world gone mad.

I moved the story to France because I thought the history of occupation and collaboration to be a powerful metaphor for the invasive presence of evil. Here was an Å½poque where cooperation and resistance were often blurred; where courageous acts were required from those who were most compromised; and where good, strong people sometimes failed despite best intentions. In many respects, it seemed to me, this was a model of human experience, writ large. And perhaps nowhere was the human confrontation with evil more starkly demonstrated than in the Vel d’Hiv roundup of 1942, when 4,051 children were separated from their parents before deportation to Auschwitz. From the outset, then, I wanted to present the agony of this history, along with the morally charged position of the bystander, whose only choice was opposition or compliance. I was as much concerned with the peculiar status of collaborators, who were sometimes in a position to influence their masters, as with resistantes, who were often powerless to intervene.

Much of my adult life has been spent as an Augustinian friar and then a barrister. Perhaps that is why I chose to explore the subject of this novel not through a re-enactment of the past, but through a present-day war crimes trial. This perspective had significant consequences: I was immediately free to explore how suffering can work its way through successive generations, such that the resolution of the past is profoundly necessary for those who were neither victims or witnesses; by using judicial procedure, the elements of the narrative are examined from an adversarial perspective, insinuating a sort of licensed scepticism that picks away at memories grown frail by the passage of time; the use of a religious context, and indeed the emphasis on the French experience, meant that the narrative had to unfold with reference to anti-Semitism in its political, theological and literary incarnations. It was my hope that all these complications personal, legal and moral could be gently touched upon in the tragic story of Agnes.

I wrote the novel after the first (and probably last) war crimes prosecution under British law and during the Irving v. Penguin libel trial. Lost retribution and Holocaust denial were thus painfully before my mind. The voices of the witnesses were fading away. All of which suggests this book is a testament of sorts, but not mine. It is in part, the handing on of someone else’s memory. A native of England, William Brodrick became an Augustinian friar at the age of 19. Leaving religious life six years later, he worked with homeless people and then became a lawyer. His first novel, The Sixth Lamentation is being published this month by Viking. Brodrick lives in Normandy, France with his wife and three children.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Lloyd Armour

Readers know they can count on Robin Cook for a thriller that never lets up in intensity until the final page, and Vector is no different. It’s a true page-turner, with a little levity thrown in for good measure.

Yuri Davydov is a Russian emigre who drives a cab in New York City. He hates it. He has also begun to hate his adopted country because he believes it has denied him his slice of the American Dream. He is snarled at by customers, ignored by other drivers, and pushed to near distraction by his wife, a compulsive eater and chronic complainer.

Davydov has the skills to strike out at the whole world. In his homeland, he was a technician in the Soviet biological weapons program his last assignment being at a plant identified only as Vector.

He falls in with a couple of firemen named Curt and Steve who find out about Davydov’s capabilities. They have a deadly project of their own they want to blow up a federal building. Davydov would simply like to release anthrax in Central Park and kill a few thousand people.

He has already experimented on a few poor-tipping fares and sundry other souls. Now, at the behest of Curt and Steve, Davydov decides that his wife must be killed for security reasons so he kills her.

In the meantime, Drs. Jack Stapleton and Laurie Montgomery begin to witness some rather curious things in their capacity as forensic pathologists, including the fact that a young, reasonably healthy black woman is dead of respiratory failure. She is Yuri Davydov’s wife. But before Stapleton can get through the bureaucracy to request permission for an autopsy, she is cremated.

Stapleton begins to think that a series of curious coincidences is really a string of murders, but nobody except Laurie believes him; his superiors and colleagues are skeptical. Some think Stapleton is off his rocker, to put it mildly.

It becomes a race against time for Jack and Laurie to solve what amounts to a jigsaw puzzle with lots of missing pieces. If they do not, thousands may die in a city most vulnerable to biological weapons. Cook has a super-charged story to tell, and as usual, he tells it very well. Lloyd Armour is a retired newspaper editor.

Readers know they can count on Robin Cook for a thriller that never lets up in intensity until the final page, and Vector is no different. It's a true page-turner, with a little levity thrown in for good measure.

Yuri Davydov is…

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Bruce Tierney

Liberty Falling, the latest installment in Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon series, finds the park ranger/sleuth in the Big Apple. Not a lot of call for a park ranger in New York City, one might think, but in fact one of the most popular tourist parks in the country can be found within the city limits: Ellis and Liberty Islands, home of the Statue of Liberty.

Anna has rather more personal reasons for being in New York City: Her sister Molly is in the ICU of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, and Anna must face the prospect of her sister’s possible death. Because she can’t bear to stay at her sister’s apartment, Anna bunks with an old ranger buddy out on Liberty Island.

From the outset, her stay is punctuated by bizarre and deadly events: a young girl apparently dives to her death from the observation platform in the crown of the statue; someone in the onlooking crowd claims that the girl had some help from an aggressive park ranger; within days, said ranger is found dead; Anna is pushed in front of an oncoming subway, only to be saved at the last moment by a casual passerby. Given to paranoia at the best of times, Anna tries to dismiss the events as coincidence, but as the week wears on it becomes more and more difficult.

Liberty Falling is something of a departure for Nevada Barr. In several of Anna’s earlier adventures, the crimes centered around time-honored themes of jealousy or greed. The bad guys (and/or girls) in Liberty Falling are not so simply motivated; conspiracy piles upon conspiracy until Anna is literally awash in a sea of red herring (and worse, considering that it’s New York Harbor after all). The fate of the premiere symbol of freedom hangs in the balance.

One cannot help but agree with beleaguered Anna as she quips: All the world’s a plot, and all the men and women in it merely suspects. Bruce Tierney lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Liberty Falling, the latest installment in Nevada Barr's Anna Pigeon series, finds the park ranger/sleuth in the Big Apple. Not a lot of call for a park ranger in New York City, one might think, but in fact one of the most popular tourist parks…

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by John Messer

In his latest international thriller, The Marching Season, Daniel Silva continues the unique blend of fact and fiction that gives his stories the immediacy and urgency of the evening news. Michael Osbourne, the CIA officer who narrowly survived an assassination attempt by a former KGB killer, code named October in The Mark of the Assassin, retired from the agency and eased into a comfortable, domestic routine with his Wall Street lawyer wife Elizabeth and their young twins. The Marching Season begins several years later when Douglas Cannon, Elizabeth’s father and a retired U.

S. senator, accepts appointment as the American ambassador to Great Britain with a commitment to advance a fragile peace agreement in Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Accords. Despite its acceptance by the country’s major political factions, the agreement also spawned a few small extremist groups dedicated to destruction of the peace process. One such group, the Ulster Freedom Brigade (UFB), begins a bombing campaign and then sets its sights on Douglas Cannon as its next high-profile target. Michael’s longtime friend lures him back into service in the agency’s effort to reinforce British security measures to protect the new ambassador.

The expected attack on Cannon and Osbourne’s role are reminiscent of a younger Jack Ryan in Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games. Silva’s narrative has the same effect on this earlier fictional creation as tilting a holographic picture; the reader suddenly sees a new and intriguing perspective.

With The Marching Season, Daniel Silva confirms his position as a frontrunner to succeed Tom Clancy as America’s foremost source of international intrigue fiction. Clearly, Osbourne has a great future; one that Silva will share with his many admirers.

John Messer is a freelance reviewer in Ludington, Michigan.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

It takes two: partners in crime

Behind the Book by G.H. Ephron

by G.H. Ephron

It was a leaden, wintry Sunday afternoon two years ago, and Don Davidoff and I were supposed to be brainstorming ideas for our fourth Dr. Peter Zak mystery we share the pseudonym G. H. Ephron. Instead, Don was enthusing about a new magnetic resonance imaging scanner that had recently arrived at McLean Hospital, the psychiatric hospital where he runs an inpatient unit. This was not just any scanner. “It’s a 3.5 tesla,” he said. Teslas? I hadn’t a clue what those were. But if Don thought 3.5 of them were a lot, then I knew enough to be impressed. “What if . . . ” Don began. Obsessed with the brain since he first dissected one in graduate school, he was off, speculating. Could an up-close look at functioning brain cells reveal signs of dementia long before intellect began to noticeably decay? Don’s enthusiasm was contagious. We could use this in the book, I thought. Magnetic resonance imaging could be the backdrop for a story about a brilliant doctor whose research is driven by the tantalizing idea that dementia can be diagnosed and treated early. I began taking notes. By the end of the afternoon, we had a premise, a rough plot outline and a working title: Obsessed. During the week, I massaged the outline and e-mailed it to Don. That’s how our partnership has worked for the past eight years. We meet every Sunday, moving from general idea to broad outline to specific scenes. I bring the characters to life, create the drama and suspense, sprinkle the red herring, while Don lives, eats and breathes the issues we weave through our books. Lower-case amnesia, addiction and delusion have all turned into upper-case book titles. Obsessed, our latest, explores a range of obsessions from psychosexual stalking to obsessive hoarding to apotemnophilia (the desire to be an amputee). As in all our books, we examine what goes on in the mind and how that shapes the reality a person creates.

Our partnership is based on a 30-year friendship, and works precisely because we have virtually no overlapping skills. When we started to work together, Don was afraid I was going to make him write. It took me a while to realize that I’d been afraid he was going to want to write. That surprised me, because I’d spent decades insisting that I was not a writer.

I come from a family of formidable literary talents. My parents were Hollywood screenwriters Henry and Phoebe Ephron (Carousel; Desk Set). My sisters Nora, Delia and Amy are all novelists and screenwriters. But I didn’t try my hand at the family business until about 10 years ago. That’s when a freelancer called. She wanted to write an article about me because I was, as she pointed out, “the only one who didn’t write.” I was shocked to hear myself shoot back, “If anyone’s going to write about me not writing, it’s going to be me.” Soon after that, my husband and I were having dinner with Don and his wife, Susan. Maybe it was too much wine, but by the end of the evening, Don and I had agreed to collaborate on a mystery series with a central character based loosely on Don.

“My better half,” is what Don calls Peter Zak, who is a little taller, a little younger and a little more conventionally handsome than his prototype. Like Don, a neuropsychologist, Dr. Zak runs a unit at a psychiatric hospital, and spends time in jails in four-by-four cubicles evaluating people accused of murder. That’s Don’s voice when Dr. Zak says, “A lot of people who end up accused of serious crimes are poor schnooks, in the wrong place at the wrong time, who rarely get an adequate defense.” I remember one of our earliest working sessions. It was a gorgeous Sunday afternoon in late summer, and we were supposed to be coming up with an opening scene for Amnesia, the first series novel. Instead, Don was wishing he was out rowing on the Charles River. I hate boats, but I found myself mesmerized as Don described the Zen-like state of calm rowing brings him. “You’re pulling, harder and harder, until the stern clears the puddles before the oars dip again, and boat, body and mind become one,” he said. I didn’t know if the stern was the front or the back of the boat, and I wasn’t sure what he meant by “puddles,” but I was absolutely certain that our character was going to be a rower. I began taking notes.

Hallie Ephron and her coauthor, Dr. Don Davidoff, both live and work in Massachusetts. Their fifth novel, Obsessed (St. Martin’s, $24.95, 320 pages, ISBN 0312305311), released under the pen name G.H. Ephron, goes on sale this month.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Le Carre begins with a bang: This gun is not a gun.

Or such was Mr. Winser’s determined conviction when the youthful Alix Hoban, European managing director and chief executive of Trans-Finanz Vienna, Petersburg, and Istanbul, introduced a pallid hand into the breast of his Italian blazer and extracted neither a platinum cigarette case nor an engraved business card, but a slim blue-black automatic pistol in mint condition, and pointed it from a distance of six inches at the bridge of Mr. Winser’s beakish but strictly nonviolent nose. This gun does not exist. Le Carre takes us inside Winser’s head while the pistol is held in his face, backward through his life, his sex life, his business life, building empathy with Winser. Horrified, we see the gangsters with Hoban produce a video camera, all for the point of filming Winser’s execution. The gun is, indeed, a gun. But first-rate espionage writing has to be more than bang-bang, shoot-em-up. And there is not much doubt about Le Carre being first-rate. From being smacked in the face with this beginning dramatic flourish, we are then led through the diminuendo of explication, the weaving of the tapestry of this particular world where the hoods make international cell phone calls and film their executions. It is in some senses a new world for Le Carre readers the Georgia mafia meets Tony London merchant banking. But in many ways, it is the world this masterful storyteller has given us for years.

We have a hero: flawed, scarred by life, unlucky in love, and above all, deeply ambivalent about his professional mission. The people he loves often end up dead. And the threat to them drives the hero to shed his ambiguities and step up to the challenge, pistol in hand.

This time our man is Oliver Single, an awkward, overlarge magician, an entertainer of children. He is living the quiet life. Occasionally he drinks to the point of oblivion. He has the air of having been deeply wounded. But there is more to Oliver than the magician lodger. He is really the son of Tiger Single, the tiny, fastidious mogul who heads the House of Single, a merchant banking firm. To the world, Tiger has made his considerable pile by being the bold venture capitalist who knows the ropes in the former Soviet empire. We learn, however, that the secret of Single’s success is better described as laundering and lubricating the flow of funds for the Orlov gang, as colorful a pack of villains as Le Carre ever created.

Young Oliver joins the firm, falls in love, and becomes a traitor to his father’s cause. That much you learn in the first few pages. For the rest of this intriguing, brilliantly plotted story one of Le Carre’s best you have the pleasure of settling down with a couple of Singles.

W. Foster is an attorney in Columbia, South Carolina.

Le who? John Le Carre was born in England in 1931. After attending the universities of Berne and Oxford, he spent five years in the British Foreign Service. He is the author of 17 novels, including Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: A Perfect Spy, The Little Drummer Girl, The Russia House, and The Tailor of Panama. His books have been translated into 25 languages. He lives in England.

Le Carre begins with a bang: This gun is not a gun.

Or such was Mr. Winser's determined conviction when the youthful Alix Hoban, European managing director and chief executive of Trans-Finanz Vienna, Petersburg, and Istanbul, introduced a pallid hand into the…

Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense

Finding inspiration for a No. 1 series

Behind the Book by Alexander McCall Smith

by Alexander McCall Smith

Where do the people in books come from? Authors are often asked this question, and they often find difficulty in answering. As the author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series of novels, I am often asked how it is that I have ended up writing about a woman who lives far away in Botswana, when I am a man living at the other end of the world. This strikes people as rather strange, and I suppose that in a sense it is.

I decided to write about a woman from Botswana some years ago, when I witnessed the remarkable sight of a woman chasing a chicken about the yard in a Botswana village. The chicken came off second best, and was duly dispatched to provide the next day's lunch. But what remained in my mind was the cheerfulness of the woman who performed this rather everyday task. And I thought that one day, I might write about a woman who was competent and resourceful and who was born in that particular village.

Years passed before I sat down to write a story about just such a woman. My wife and I were spending some time in the south of France. I sat down at the desk in the house in which we were staying and wrote a short story about a woman called Precious Ramotswe, who inherits cattle from her father and sells them. She decides to set up a small detective agency with the proceeds, rather than to establish a more mundane and safer business. I enjoyed writing this short story, and I found that I liked the character I had created. At the end of the story, it occurred to me that I should write further stories about this woman, and I did so. These became a book and the book became a series. These books then completely changed my life.

I had not intended to write a mystery series, and indeed there is comparatively little mystery in these books. They are really the story of one woman, Precious Ramotswe, and of those who play a part in her life her fiance, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni; her assistant, Mma. Makutsi; and her friend, the matron of an orphan farm, Mma. Potokwani. They are the sorts of people who might escape notice, except for one thing: they are all, in their various ways, good people.

I decided to write books about good people for a set of very particular reasons. I think that there are so many books which stress the dysfunctional in life, that deal with conflict and tragedy. In my books, everybody behaves rather well towards one another. They are polite people they use courteous language, they understand and forgive, they are kind. And why not? Why should we not have books about people like that? People have said to me that I am a Utopian novelist. Some people suggest that there cannot be people like this, that Precious Ramotswe cannot exist. I disagree! Botswana is a remarkable country which has made a great success of itself. It is has shown that countries in Africa can be well run and prosperous. And what is more, there are plenty of people in African countries who are leading profoundly decent lives, often in conditions of some difficulty. I hope that my books show that this is all possible. And if these books are, as some people have suggested, a love letter to a country, then I am proud to sign my name to that love letter.

The fifth book in the series, The Full Cupboard of Life, has just been published in the United States. I have finished work on the manuscript of the sixth, which will be published next year. With each visit I make to the world of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, the more I become attached to the characters and involved in their lives. They are very real to me, as I suppose must be inevitable if one is writing a series of this nature. So I hear their voices. Mma. Ramotswe, too, is at my elbow, giving me occasional pieces of advice. And if she were to walk in the door tomorrow, I know that we would sit down together and have a cup of her favorite bush tea. And then we might go for a walk, and look out over that landscape that she loves so much, with its wide plains and its thorn trees, and its great, echoing empty sky.

Alexander McCall Smith was born in Africa and currently lives in Scotland, where he teaches medical law at Edinburgh University. His latest book is The Full Cupboard of Life, the fifth installment in the best-selling No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Fiction comes to life on daytime drama

Behind the Book by Michael Malone

by Michael Malone

Hyperion Books first talked with me about writing a novel tied to ABC’s daytime drama “One Life to Live” while I was co-head-writing the show. My first response was no. I didn’t want to do a novelization of the soap opera or a spin-off or a journal. Besides, there was already more than enough fiction for me to imagine in the world of “One Life” itself five hours of drama a week, 52 weeks a year of interlaced, multigenerational plots for a whole town full of people of every social and psychological ilk. That narrative range and abundance of character was what had drawn me, as a novelist, to writing soap opera. I loved its capacious canvas and its generic receptivity. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Hyperion’s suggestion, and about how soap opera might lend itself to the idea not of novelizing the show, but of writing a novel on the show. That was the genesis of The Killing Club.

We would watch a fictional character create a piece of fiction, a mystery novel, as a storyline on “One Life to Live.” We would watch the novel as it was being planned, and as it was written, and read, and finally published. The novel was “written” by Marcie Walsh (wonderfully played by the actress Kathy Briar), a smart, spunky young woman who attended “Llanview University” and worked as the receptionist at the Llanview police station. For her fiction, she drew upon as writers do people and events in her “real” life: the detectives and lawyers with whom she worked and the crimes she saw being investigated around her. As she caught the mystery bug, she read other mysteries (including one of mine) and she tried (sometimes with comic, sometimes with dangerous results) to solve crimes herself. Finally, encouraged by her doctor boyfriend and her crew of college friends, she decided to write her own book. The Killing Club is that novel. The plot evolved from an idea for a movie that my colleague at “One Life,” Josh Griffith, and I had had about a group of misfits in high school who have a club in which they imagine ingenious ways to murder their “enemies.” Then, 10 years later, one of the club members is murdered in just such a bizarre way. Then another club member dies. Then another. Who is killing the Killing Club? And why? On the show, a friend of Marcie’s sent the manuscript to Michael Malone, the novelist, a “professor at Llanview University.” Mr. Malone liked what he saw of Marcie’s book and decided to help her with it and then to find her a publisher. He sent the novel to Hyperion Books. They accepted it. Excitedly Marcie traveled to New York to meet Gretchen Young, who is the real editor of the real book, just as Chip Kidd, whom she was also thrilled to meet, is the real cover designer. The Killing Club was “published” on the show at the same time that it was published in “real life” mid-February. In the future, mysterious goings-on will happen in Marcie’s life that eerily reflect the plot of the novel. The creation of the novel, The Killing Club, over the past year on “One Life” has been, then, the creation of a fiction about a fiction inside a fiction. But it is also a “real” novel. In that regard, for me the challenge was, as always, the narrative voice. What sort of narrator would Marcie Walsh “create”? The voice turned out to be that of Jamie Ferrara, a young wisecracking homicide detective in the small town of Gloria, New Jersey, the working-class daughter of an Italian-American cop, and herself one of the founders of the Killing Club.

People ask me, is this a Marcie Walsh book or a Michael Malone book? I would answer that my books are Michael Malone books, but each evolves from the characters who inhabit it. The minute I hear the voice of a narrator, from word one of page one of a story, I am listening to that character’s voice. The narrator of Handling Sin is very different from that of The Last Noel, and Jamie Ferrara is very different from the Southern detective Cuddy Mangum in my Hillston novels. But they are all, I trust, equally at home in the landscape of my fiction.

Acclaimed novelist Michael Malone published his first book in 1975 and went on to write such Southern comic classics as Handling Sin. He has also written extensively for television, including two stints as head writer for the soap opera “One Life to Live.” In his latest book, The Killing Club, Malone combines both careers with fascinating and spine-tingling results.

Hyperion Books first talked with me about writing a novel tied to ABC's daytime drama "One Life to Live" while I was co-head-writing the show. My first response was no. I didn't want to do a novelization of the soap opera or a spin-off or…

Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense

Behind the Book: My own learning process

Behind the Book by Dana Buchman

by Dana Buchman

I was an English major in college and have always adored reading. You might think the fact that I love books would make the prospect of writing one easier. In truth, it was the opposite. My reverence and respect for authors and books made the idea of writing a book intimidating. But I felt I had a story to tell a story that could help another parent whose child has a learning disability (or, as I prefer to call it, a learning difference). I travel around the country a lot doing trunk shows for my apparel company and I often hear women talking about children, nieces, nephews and children of friends who have LD. It always makes me think back to when I first found out about my daughter Charlotte’s LD almost 15 years ago. If I had known then what I know now, how different and easier those years would have been.

Since I wanted to write a book to help other parents who stood in my shoes, I realized that I would have to tell the truth. This, after all, was more a story of emotions than a straight narrative. If I were going to tell the story of how LD affected not only Charlotte, but me and our family, I’d have to make sure I told everything.

I’ve read that writers often don’t know what they’re going to say until they sit down and start writing, that the process of letting it flow of excavating the emotional story can be emotional in itself. That was certainly the case for me.

I wrote A Special Education: One Family’s Journey Through the Maze of Learning Disabilities as a series of free-writes. The hardest part was mining my memory and feelings. I would get up early, while the house was quiet, make a strong cup of black coffee and type and type not stopping to correct grammar or to format the paragraphs, not correcting or backspacing for anything. If I wanted to go back and say something a different way, I’d just go forward and say it a different way. The flow was essential. I was afraid that any pause would distract me from the difficult, often painful mission of looking at each stage of Charlotte’s growing up. Of our family’s growing up. Of my growing up. I could always tell when I had unearthed something important. It was invariably what was most painful, most embarrassing, buried the deepest. I’d invariably stop typing. Stop. And almost look over my shoulder as though someone were looking. Sometimes I’d utter the words I can’t say that out loud to the empty room.

But I knew that I had to, because the message of A Special Education is about letting feelings, vulnerabilities and imperfections show. It’s about how doing that heals us and makes us better how we become more whole and more human. I hope the parents who read this book will know that they are not alone. At the time, I thought I was alone. I thought that I was the only one who felt confused, anxious, angry, ashamed and overwhelmed by having a child with special needs. Now I see myself as part of a community of educators, of specialists . . . of other parents. And I see Charlotte much more clearly for who she is a brave young woman with unique abilities.

Dana Buchman’s line of women’s clothing can be found in major department stores around the country. She lives in New York City with her husband, Tom Farber, and their daughter Annie. Their eldest daughter, Charlotte Farber, is a college student in New England.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Worlds collide

Behind the Book by Brad Meltzer

by Brad Meltzer

Every writer has a story they've been waiting their whole life to tell. This is mine. I know this because I first pitched The Book of Lies over a decade ago. When my first novel, The Tenth Justice, was published, my original pitch for the follow-up was a story involving Cain. Exactly. Cain. As in, Cain and Abel. My editor at the time smartly told me: "You've just established yourself as a best-selling author of legal thrillers. Do you really want to risk it all by suddenly switching to kooky things like Cain?"

It was a moment I'll never forget. I could be brave and do what I want. Or I could cave and keep the publisher happy.

I caved. I was 27 years old and barely had paid off my student loans. I caved in no time at all. In fact, I set the record for caving.

Skip forward a full decade. I'm at a Florida book signing for my last thriller, The Book of Fate, and I'm talking about my love of the character known as Superman and his creator, Jerry Siegel. Right then (and this only happens in Florida) an elderly woman stands up and shouts, "I know more about Superman and Jerry Siegel than you ever will!"

And I think to myself, "Lady, there's no way you know more about Superman than I do."

And then she says, "Sure I do. Jerry Siegel's my uncle."

Let me be clear here. I am not good at reading subtlety. I need giant cartoon hammers over my head. Lightning bolts from the sky. Volcanoes. So I nod.

And then another guy in the same signing raises his hand and says, "I served with Jerry Siegel in the Army!"

Boom.

I had my idea.

Over the course of the next two years, this sweet relative of Jerry Siegel invites me into her family. I hear the stories of Superman's creation. For the past 70 years, the public has been told that Superman was created by two teenagers in Cleveland. And that's true. Action Comics was published in 1938. But what no one realizes is that Superman was actually created in 1932, just weeks after Jerry Siegel's father was killed in a still-unsolved robbery. So why did the world get Superman? Because a little boy named Jerry Siegel heard his father was murdered and, in grief, created a bulletproof man.

And why does no one know the story? Because Jerry Siegel never told anyone. In the thousands of interviews he gave throughout his life, where they asked him where he got the idea for Superman, Jerry never once mentions that his father was killed during a robbery. To this day, half the family was told it was a heart attack, while the other half says it was a murder. It makes perfect sense. When Superman was first introduced, he couldn't fly. He didn't have heat or X-ray vision. All he was, was strong—and bulletproof. The one thing young Jerry's dad needed. And that's why the world got Superman. Not because America is the greatest country on earth. But because a little boy lost his father.

When I started to incorporate my thriller story into the Superman research, I had the world's greatest hero, but something was still missing. And then, I remembered my original idea from 10 years back. Cain. The man who brought murder into this world. And the world's first villain.

Boom.

I had another idea.

In Chapter 4 of the Bible, Cain kills Abel. It is arguably the world's most famous murder. But the Bible is silent about one key detail: the weapon that Cain used to kill his brother. In 1932, Mitchell Siegel was shot in the chest and killed. But the murder weapon from that murder is also lost to this day. So what do these two murders—thousands of years apart—possibly have to do with each other? That's what I needed to find out.

To be clear, research isn't magic. It's just legwork. I spoke to Jerry Siegel's family, as well as his widow and his daughter, who told me that in all the years that people have written about the Siegels, I'm the first one to actually call and speak with all of them. During the research, I went back and searched through the old newspapers from 1932 just to see what was going on when Jerry's father was killed. You won't believe what's in there.

It was the same with Cain. According to most modern Bibles, Cain thinks God's punishment is too much—My punishment is greater than I can bear is what the text says, which is why Cain is seen as such a remorseless monster. But when you go back to the original text—like in the Geniza fragments from Cairo—that same passage can just as easily be translated as My sin is too great to forgive. See the difference there? In this version, Cain feels so awful . . . so sorry . . . for what he's done to poor Abel, he tells God he should never be forgiven. That's a pretty different view of Cain. Of course, most religions prefer the vicious Cain. A little threat of evil is always the best way to fill the seats. But sometimes the monsters aren't who we think they are.

And slowly, the two worlds—my oldest saved story, and my newest one—began to collide. These stories—about Cain and Abel, about Superman—are not just folklore. They're stories about us. Our heroes and villains tell us who we are. And sometimes we need to find the truth, even if it means revealing our own vulnerabilities.

Most important for me, the interesting part has never been the Superman story; the interesting part is Clark Kent—the idea that all of us, in all our ordinariness, can change the world.

But that still doesn't mean I'm telling you what my characters really find inside the Book of Lies.

The Book of Lies is the seventh novel by Brad Meltzer and a follow-up to The Book of Fate, which was a #1 bestseller. Meltzer, who was just out of law school when his first book, The Tenth Justice, was published in 1997, lives in Florida with his wife, who is also an attorney.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Behind the Book: The small things

Behind the Book by George Dawes Green

by George Dawes Green

While researching Ravens I got the chance to ride on patrol with a Brunswick, Georgia, cop. I’ll call him Officer Jack. He took me driving around and around the slow-baking city. Nothing was stirring.

Like the sad jowly cop in Ravens, Jack had been a detective before his own eagerness had tripped him up. He’d fallen far, and wound up as a corporal on this traffic beat. Many times he’d thought of getting back on that ladder again — re-applying for sergeant or detective — but all that was too much hassle, and besides, he couldn’t bear the the boredom of a desk job. He wanted to be out on the streets, working with people.

We took Rt. 17 north and then the I-95 Spur west. One strip mall after another. Ace Hardware, Wendy’s, Cap’n D’s Seafood, Empire Title Pawn. Now and then came fleeting pockets of deep antique beauty. Trailers shrouded in grey moss, clustering around an oak tree. A rolling seascape of kudzu.

A million years ago, this had been my home town.

Jack, knowing I was writing a thriller, tried to tell me thrilling stories from his detective days. But thrillingness wasn’t what I wanted from him. I wanted some essential generous detail to bestow upon my character. Although I had no idea what that might be.

We fell silent. There were no drug deals going down that day, no murders, no knife-fights, nothing — not so much as a broken taillight. Just the hot summer streets for hour after hour. Officer Jack kept apologizing. Finally, Dispatch sent us to an elementary school in the ghetto. School was in summer recess, but the old women working in the office told us they’d heard strange noises. We investigated. Tramped through the lonely gym, the cafeteria. The A/C was scarcely working and the place was an inferno. Passing one classroom, we spotted two little girls clambering out of a window. One was chubby, and got stuck, and Jack nabbed her. The other one got away.

Jack brought the chubby one back to the office and sat her down. Naturally she started to bawl. This moon-faced white cop and his creepy companion (me): we must have been terrifying. Jack tried to get her to confess what she’d been up to. Why would any child ever try to break into school?

She said something about a ‘picture’ — but she was bawling so hard we couldn’t understand her.

Then a strange thing happened. Her partner in crime showed up. The girl had made a clean escape, but she came back to face the music because, I suppose, she knew it was wrong to leave your friend.

She sat down and folded her arms and stared at us with enormous eyes. She was tiny and beautiful, and perhaps eight years old. She was a ghetto child. She wouldn’t say a word. Tears were flowing from her eyes but she didn’t blink and she held her silence.

But Jack kept patiently, gently pressing her, and finally she turned away and let it out. She said she had brought her friend into school to see a picture.

"What picture?" Jack asked.

"Picture I made."

Jack asked if we could look at this picture. So she took us back to that classroom, and hung up on the wall was a watercolor of a school bus. It was stunning. The bus had the soft underside of a living creature. I told her how much I liked it, and Jack said she should listen to me because I was from New York and knew everything about art.

He was beaming.

He was so taken by these amazing girls.

And I had what I wanted. I wrote the scene into Ravens. It’s not thrilling; it’s just a moment of rest, an aside from the tension.

But it has its own quietly beating heart and I think it gives life to my Brunswick cop. It might even make my readers love him. And I know if I can get you to love my characters — well, that’s really the whole deal. That’s all I’ve ever looked for.

Screenwriter George Dawes Green is the author of Ravens. His first novel in 14 years, it tells the story of a family of lottery winners whose newfound weath endangers their lives.

Author photo (c) Nick Cardillichio.

While researching Ravens I got the chance to ride on patrol with a Brunswick, Georgia, cop. I'll call him Officer Jack. He took me driving around and around the slow-baking city. Nothing was stirring.

Like the sad jowly cop in Ravens, Jack…

Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense

Trip to Turkey reveals truths about women

Behind the Book by Tasha Alexander

by Tasha Alexander

We all have preconceived notions. It’s unavoidable. One of the most exciting things about doing book research is discovering all the ways in which our assumptions about people, places, and history are wrong. In the course of writing five novels (almost six; I’m just about done!), I’ve been forced again and again to revise my opinions about our Victorian counterparts.

But of all the books I’ve written, none has surprised me as much as Tears of Pearl. I’d decided to send Emily and Colin to Constantinople for their honeymoon—partly because I loved the exotic nature of the city and partly because I liked the idea of Emily, who struggles with the limits English society placed on women in the 19th century, in a society where the so-called weaker sex were even more repressed.

Sounds great, right? I thought so. But after I’d read letters and memoirs from women of the period, I realized the Ottoman ladies had a great deal more freedom and upward mobility than the average Englishwoman of the time. Their veils, which I’d ignorantly viewed as repressive, actually gave them quite a bit of freedom—they enabled them to move about the city freely without anyone knowing who they were. Meeting a lover in a café? No problem. The veil keeps you anonymous.

Last year, while working on the book, I visited Istanbul (because, as we all know, you can’t go back to Constantinople…). And for all that we like to think of our contemporary selves as modern and enlightened, many people did not react well to the idea of my trip. They didn’t think it was safe for a woman to travel alone to Turkey—surely it would be too dangerous. Now, of course it’s essential to be careful any time you’re traveling. But I can honestly say that I’ve never felt safer in a city than Istanbul. If anything, men were more respectful of a solitary woman than they are in New York or Chicago.

My first morning in the city, I met three wonderful American women at breakfast in my hotel. (You won’t find a more glorious breakfast spread anywhere than that set out at the Hotel Empress Zoe every morning.) They were going the hamam—the Turkish baths—that evening and invited me to join them. The hamam was high on my list for must-sees in the city. I’d read all kinds of fabulous descriptions of them in letters written by Victorian English women travelers. As a junkie of all things spa-related, I loved the idea of being massaged and scrubbed. But I must confess to having felt a little nervous about the whole thing.

First, because I wasn’t exactly sure what the process would be like. Second was the whole issue of sitting around naked in a room full of total strangers.

Going with my new found friends alleviated the first problem. Because if we all did everything wrong, at least we would all be wrong together, which is somehow less daunting than being wrong alone.

As for the second point, there was simply no avoiding it. And it struck me, as I walked into the more than 300-year-old Ca?alo?lu Hamam, that countless Victorian women travelers (Florence Nightingale included) had preceded me. And surely if they—whom we all assume to have been much more modest than the Modern American Girl—could do it, I could.

Which sounds fabulous until you’ve emerged from your beautiful wooden dressing room stark naked only to have your bath attendant hand you a tiny piece of cotton to use as a towel. This and a pair of wooden clogs are all you can take into the haratet, or hot room. We did our best to cover ourselves up and shuffled over marble floors into an enormous domed room lined with washbasins. Here you’re instructed to sit and handed a silver bowel. This you dip into the nearest basin, fill with hot water, and dump over your head. Repeat over and over and over.

Obviously at this point, you have to abandon the towel. Somewhat terrifying at first. But all the women in the hamam do it—and you find that it’s actually not so bad. And before you know it, you’re relaxed, your muscles loose as you lean against the marble bench dousing yourself with water and falling into easy conversation with the people around you. By the time your attendant comes back to lead you to the marble platform in the center of the room, where she’ll massage and scrub you, you could care less what you’re wearing. The entire ritual was amazing, and by the time I emerged, my skin softer than a baby’s, I knew that if I could, I’d hamam every single day.

It was an ethereal experience in an exquisite building. Those Victorian women travelers knew a good thing when they saw it. As much as I loved Istanbul—cruising the Bosphorus to the Black Sea, combing through the treasures of Topkap? Palace, haggling in the Grand Bazaar and the Spice Bazaar—the hamam will always be high on the list of my favorite experiences. I loved it so much I went back two more times during my trip. Research, you see, needs to be well and thoroughly done…

Tasha Alexander is finishing up her fifth novel starring Lady Emily, who heads to Turkey in Alexander's new release Tears of Pearl.