The Digger looks like you, the Digger looks like me. He walks down the wintry streets the way anybody would, shoulders drawn together against the damp December air . . . He’s not tall and not short, he’s not heavy and not thin . . . If you glanced at his eyes you wouldn’t notice the shape or the color but only that they don’t seem quite human, and if the Digger glanced at you while you were looking at him, his eyes might be the very last thing you ever saw . . .

From the very first page of Jeffery Deaver’s new thriller, The Devil’s Teardrop, both the reader and the party-hatted residents of Washington, D.C., know they’re in for a very wild last night of the century.

"I try to write roller coasters if there’s any possible way," he says.

This is the way: The Digger, a human killing machine, is programmed to randomly slaughter pedestrians at four-hour intervals until his handler receives a $20 million ransom and calls off the carnage. But when the Digger’s accomplice is killed in a freak traffic accident, the massacre continues with seemingly no way to stop it. FBI Special Agent Margaret Lukas and former FBI document specialist Parker Kincaid must search for answers within the only piece of evidence they have, the ransom note, and find the Digger before he finds them.

Deaver’s intricately woven plot explores the world of document specialists in much the same way that his recent books, The Bone Collector and The Coffin Dancer, delved into other aspects of forensics. Lincoln Rhyme, the quadriplegic hero of those books, even makes a cameo appearance. (Rhyme will take center stage again next year in Deaver’s forthcoming The Empty Chair.) There is a leitmotif throughout the book: it’s always the little things.

"I really focus on the forensic detail," Deaver admits. "In fact, in solving crimes, that really is what people focus on. You rarely find the smoking gun. The smaller details somehow resonate more clearly with people. We have small details in our own lives; we tend not to have quite so many boulders rolling toward us. I try to make it something people can really relate to."

To get there, Deaver spends roughly eight months constructing his plots, a laborious task that results in a detailed 120-page outline. Then comes another three months writing the prose and transitions, where all the hard work pays off. "Once the outline is finished, I have no problem writing 30 pages a day," he says.

Deaver takes great care to place his hero in the utmost peril, working backward to set the trap. "The endings are the most important part of the book for me, and I don’t mean the last page but the last 30 or 40 pages," he says. "The Bone Collector came to me that way. I wanted my hero to be utterly helpless at the end of the book, in a locked room with the villain and nobody coming to save him. And I thought, helpless, helpless . . . well, we can tie him up with duct tape but that’s really boring, we’ve seen that a lot. Well, I’m going to make him a paraplegic. Yeah, but then we have Ironside. No I don’t want to do that. Well, I’ll make him a quadriplegic, I’ll just up the ante. So I worked backward from there."

Of equal concern are his villains, in this case, the Digger. "I wanted a complete cipher. He really has no condition other than just brain damage. I’m so sick of the abused child who turns into the psychotic killer. And here’s a case where I wanted, not some run-of-the-mill cheap psychological explanation for why somebody was the way he was, I just wanted a killer. It would be like trying to profile a gun. He is simply a tool. That, to me, was completely terrifying."

Two camps have influenced Deaver’s writing. Stylistically, he cites literary authors Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and more contemporary writers such as Mark Halpern, Jane Smiley, and Annie Proulx. In crime fiction, he credits Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm books, and John D. MacDonald as inspirations.

His other major influence will come as no surprise to his fans.

"Movies were very important to me," Deaver says. "I don’t write my books, as some thriller writers do, to make political points, to get up on a soap box, to teach the reader esoteric information that they probably wouldn’t have access to otherwise. I want their palms to sweat and when they finish the book, say, ‘Whew, I survived.’ And movies have largely done that."

Despite the recent spate of political thrillers set in the nation’s capital, Deaver admits he chose it as the setting for The Devil’s Teardrop for a different reason. "I needed the FBI headquarters," he says. "There is such an inflation, such a ton of these political thrillers, most of which don’t really grab me very much, and I wanted to write a Washington book that didn’t really have to do with politics other than the internal politics that happen in the mayor’s office."

It’s also a city he knows well; five years ago, Deaver moved from Manhattan to Clifton, Virginia, just 20 miles west of Washington, D.C.

The Devil’s Teardrop is the 15th suspense novel from the engaging former journalist and lawyer from Glen Ellyn, Illinois, who says he’s done things a little backwards to get where he is today. "I never wanted to be a practicing attorney. I wanted to get a job with the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal reporting on legal matters. So what I did, when I was working as a journalist in New York, I went to Fordham law school at night with the idea that I would have some expertise that would get me a job at one of the better newspapers. But I happened to do real well at school. I had a lukewarm undergrad career but for some reason I really enjoyed law school."

He was recruited by the Wall Street legal firm of Lord, Day & Lord, where he practiced civil law for eight years before leaving to write fiction full-time. During those years, he published his early novels featuring a spunky punk Nancy Drew named Rune. He says Bantam Books is preparing to reissue them.

What most surprises people when they meet Jeffery Deaver for the first time? "That I’m basically a nice guy," he says with a chuckle. "It’s tough to get dates sometimes, if anybody’s read my books. People do tend to identify someone with the books they write, with some justification, but for me it’s just a job. I’ve learned what people like, I’ve learned how to craft a product that gives them some pleasure. I like to cook. I like to entertain. I like to have parties. I still have friends who will say, in the middle of one of my dinner parties, ‘God, I can’t get over that you’re the guy who writes that real creepy stuff.’"

Jay Lee MacDonald is a writer in Naples, Florida.

Country-singer-turned-mystery-writer Kinky Friedman rises each morning in his little green trailer deep in the heart of the Texas hill country and tilts at America’s sacred cows like a modern-day Don Quixote on mood elevators. His warped mysteries, together with a catalog of highly irreverent country songs from his wasted-minstrel days, represent the most wickedly funny sustained attack on racism, bigotry, and hypocrisy since Lenny Bruce.

Starting with his first mystery, Greenwich Killing Time, in 1986, through such fractured who-cares-who-done-its as Armadillos & Old Lace, Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola and The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover, Friedman’s eponymous black-Stetsoned, cigar-chomping alter ego has stumbled ever blindly toward, if not exactly enlightenment, then random illumination. He may eventually solve the crime, but more often than not the clues seek him out as he holes up in his Greenwich Village walk-up with a disinterested cat and copious amounts of Jameson’s Irish whiskey to assist cogitation. The reluctant sleuth is aided by a loose assemblage of New Yawk barroom denizens collectively known as the Village Irregulars. Messrs. Ratso, Rambam, McGovern and the rest also are real people, rendered, one suspects, just slightly more irregular as they pass through the author’s Wal-Mart typewriter. ("About the last typewriter in Texas," he says proudly, having returned to the Austin area several books ago).

When last we visited the cockeyed world of country-singer-turned-amateur-sleuth Kinky Friedman (in Blast from the Past), a chunk of ceiling plaster, dislodged by Winnie Katz’s lesbian dance class upstairs, had transported the vicar of Vandam Street on a comatose trip back to the ’70s. His 12th misadventure, Spanking Watson, continues in the Sherlock-Holmes-on-a-bender tradition. The Kinkster concocts a cold revenge on his upstairs neighbor, and of course things go immediately awry. With an almost criminal glee, Kinky dupes and recruits his colorful cronies to find a would-be assassin of Katz, then unleashes them on the unsuspecting Winnie and her Danskin-clad students like a horde of locusts on a summer field. When he learns that someone actually is intent on killing Katz, the merry chase begins in earnest.

"Spanking Watson is the search for the perfect Watson," Kinky explains in his smoke-sanded baritone. "It’s a challenge I put out to all of the Village Irregulars to try and infiltrate the lesbian dance class upstairs. Ratso becomes one of those guys you always see in an all-female aerobics class, the kind of feminine nerds that get involved in that. And all of these idiots do infiltrate the dance class. They get up there and then Rambam bugs the loft for me. They do it under the belief that a death threat has been written to Winnie Katz, which I’ve shown them. Of course, I’ve written it myself when I was drunk. It’s kind of Machiavellian. A little darker. But I think it’s funnier."

Kinky’s is perhaps the least likely of modern literary success stories. In the ’70s, young Richard Friedman parlayed his musical talent, knack for social satire, and Semitic birthright into semi-success on the fringes of country music as Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. The band’s stage shows were outrageous, thanks to Friedman’s redneck-baiting, chauvinistic stage persona, and such bitingly hilarious anthems as "They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore" and the tongue-in-cheek, anti-feminist ode, "Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed." Country music has never been fertile soil for comedy, much less satire, so it was little wonder Kinky’s music delighted the critics and offended almost everyone else. Let us note here that his "Ride ‘Em, Jewboy" remains the only country song ever recorded about the Holocaust.

"It took courage back then," he admits. "It did. That was before Howard Stern. It took pawn-shop balls. We were a country band with a social conscience — always very dangerous."

The band came to make its home in perhaps the only country bar on the planet that would have them, New York’s Lone Star Cafe. By all accounts, the party was great. "I met everybody in those days. Andy Warhol. Everybody came by," he says. But by 1976, the party was over. It took Kinky a few years to, uh, refocus and try his hand at a new medium — mystery writing. To borrow a title from one of his songs, when the Lord closes the door, he opens a little window.

"I think it was more like desperation," he admits. "I was searching for a lifestyle that did not require my presence. The Texas Jewboys had disbanded a decade earlier and I was living in New York, flying on 11 kinds of herbs and spices, and broke. So I attempted to write the first book by borrowing my friend McGovern’s typewriter."

Another pal, radio talk-jock Don Imus, pulled strings to get Greenwich Killing Time to Simon & Schuster. Since then, Kinky mysteries frequently appear on the New York Times bestseller list and have been translated into 17 foreign languages.

"It has definitely been a financial pleasure for the Kinkster," he admits. "It’s more than music has really ever been. Of course, as I always say, money can buy you a fine dog but only love can make it wag its tail."

Both Kinkys shamelessly traffic in such bons mots. "This is a Cuban cigar," he’ll say. "I’m not supporting their economy, I’m burning their fields." Or "I’m the oldest Jew in Texas who doesn’t own real estate." Some avid readers contend that these politically incorrect witticisms and rapier-like turns-of-phrase are the real reason to pick up a Kinky mystery. In fact, in tales such as Roadkill, which takes place on tour with Kinky’s compadre Willie Nelson, the plot seems to disappear altogether in a cloud of peculiar-smelling smoke.

"The problem with the Willie book was that I lost so much by taking the detective out of his natural setting. I lost all the Village Irregulars and the cat. And I only found that out halfway through. I fly by Jewish radar. I write like Oscar Wilde behind bars. I don’t structure a lot of this, and I think, in part, that if there is any freshness to these books, any flavor, that’s the reason."

If Roadkill fell short by Holmesian standards, it nonetheless brought Hollywood calling. "The latest idea is to do Roadkill with F. Murray Abraham as Willie and Lionel Richie as me," Kinky says, giving no hint as to whether he’s serious. (Asked whether he would consider playing himself, Nelson replies, "Stranger things have happened. Kinky starts these rumors, you know. And then they come true.")

In fact, the movie idea got its initial boost from a surprising source: President Clinton. "He invited me to the White House for an awards dinner honoring the arts. He must have been on medication because, out of several hundred people, he sat me right next to him at the power table there. He proceeded to try to get my books made into movies with the lady who’s the head of Paramount Pictures, Sherry Lansing."

Equally surprising, the idiosyncratic musings of a Lone Star Jewish iconoclast have been bestsellers in Germany, Holland, and England. Explanation, please? "The rest of the world sees these books as a commentary on America," Kinky says. "It’s unconscious commentary on America. I find that women and little old ladies are really picking up the books. Even though the books are becoming increasingly profane, they’re also possibly becoming increasingly profound."

How close is the fictional Kinkster to his creator? "I think the books are very close to home. They represent an inward turning. I often write with an utter disregard for the reader. That’s the most honest way to write. At the moment, the books I’m writing, each one seems to be the best one. All I have to do is continue to be unhappy and I’ll be fine."

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Naples, Florida.

How many 70-year-olds can also claim the title of best-selling debut novelist? We know of at least one: Canadian author Alan Bradley, whose first novel (after two nonfiction projects), The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, became a word-of-mouth hit in early 2009. Set in Britain just after World War II and starring Flavia de Luce, a fiercely intelligent 11-year-old with a talent for chemistry and a nose for mystery, the book was nominated for a handful of awards—and won the hearts of more than a handful of readers. Now Bradley has released the second Flavia de Luce mystery, The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag. This time, Flavia is investigating the murder of a traveling puppeteer whose death might drag a skeleton from the closet of her small English community.

We contacted Bradley, who now lives in Malta with his family, to find out more about the series, his inspiration for Flavia and the many reasons women make better detectives than men.

You’ve said that Flavia just showed up while you were writing a different novel and “hijacked the book.” What was it about her that fired up your imagination? Do children like Flavia still exist today?
I loved Flavia’s undimmed enthusiasm: that powerful sense of self that 11-year-olds can sometimes have. That and the intense focus. I believe that children of that caliber haven’t changed at all over the years, because they tend to be not much influenced by outside demands upon their attention.

At 71 years old, did you ever worry about finding the voice of an 11-year-old girl?
No. There must be a lot of the 11-year-old Alan Bradley left inside me!

Growing up in Canada in the 1950s, was your childhood in any way similar to Flavia’s?
I suppose it was, in the sense that, as a child, I was left alone a lot. And I like to think that I had that kind of burning enthusiasm. My passion was lenses and mirrors—I loved to play with light.

You had never been to England before writing the first Flavia de Luce book—how did you create such an evocative setting?
I grew up in a family of English expatriates who never stopped talking about “back home.” Books about England have always been a favorite read—I have a wonderful collection of them!

Flavia knows a good deal more about science than your average tween—it’s how she makes sense of the world. Was this an interest of yours already, or did you have to study to write the book? Why did you choose chemistry as Flavia’s obsession?
I chose chemistry because it is a subject about which I know absolutely nothing. As I’ve said before, Flavia knows everything there is to be known about chemistry, while what I know about it could be put in a thimble with room left over for a finger. I’m learning, though! I’ve actually come to love poring over ancient chemistry books.

Rights to the first Flavia de Luce novel have been sold in several countries. Which cover is your favorite? How does it feel to be an international success? And do you have any overseas publicity tours planned for book #2?
Rights to the first book in the series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie have been sold in 31 countries, and to The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, in 19, so far. I love all of the covers—but for different reasons. The U.S. edition, from Delacorte Press, set an incredibly high standard to which every other country has aspired. I’ve just seen the Turkish cover today, and it’s breathtaking.

It’s lovely to know that so many readers love Flavia so fiercely. I’ve even heard from a couple of ladies in Washington who have formed The Flavia de Luce Adoration Society!

I often find when I meet Flavia’s fans that we have a lot in common, so it’s extremely gratifying to know that she’s being welcomed into such compatible company.
Besides the upcoming tour of Canada and the U.S., I’ll be visiting London in April, with two trips to Germany planned for later in the year.

You are also the co-author of Ms. Holmes of Baker Street, a book that presents the hypothesis that Sherlock Holmes was a woman. Do you think women are better suited to detection than men?

Yes. I’m surprised that no one’s ever spotted that before. Women are equipped by nature for the task: for example they have a better sense of smell, hearing, touch and taste than men. What is remarkable in a man is commonplace in a woman: it’s sometimes called “intuition,” but it’s really a kind of secret brain power. If more detectives were women there’d be fewer unsolved crimes.

You’ve planned six Flavia novels—without giving away too much, how do you see the character changing over the course of the series? How has she changed between books 1 and 2?
Since book two takes place barely a month after the first, there’s not a lot of change in Flavia. But she’s definitely growing up as she learns more and more about her place in the world. And it’s not all pleasant.

What books did you enjoy as a child?
I was an early reader. My two older sisters taught me to read before I went to Kindergarten, and once I’d worked my way through Huckleberry Finn and the set of Mark Twain books my mother owned, I read anything I could lay my hands on. One of my sisters had a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I didn’t understand it, but I loved the words. After Ulysses, Dick & Jane were crashing bores.

What mystery writers influenced you?
Dorothy L. Sayers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie—also, many of the mystery novelists who were writing during the 1960’s and ‘70’s, such as Laurence Meynell, Peter Lovesey, Catherine Aird—the list goes on and on.

What’s next for Flavia?
I’m currently working on book three, which is called A Red Herring Without Mustard. I can’t say much about it except that a Gypsy caravan is involved and that Flavia stumbles upon a particularly gruesome murder. I love that word, “gruesome”—don’t you?