The mystery stacks are filled with the works of former trial lawyers, prosecutors, judges, detectives, even beat cops whose procedural knowledge and behind-the-scenes experience bring a heightened realism to their fiction.

But Ian Rankin, whose Inspector Rebus novels are the number-one selling mysteries in Great Britain, may be the only crime novelist who began his career as a murder suspect.

It was all a misunderstanding, of course, the very sort of stumbling-toward-stardom happenstance that peppers the engaging Scottish writer’s rather checkered job history. Before we get to his previous failed careers as a punk rocker, grape picker, swineherd, stereo reviewer and "alcohol researcher," what’s all this about a murder rap?

Rankin answers this and other questions by phone from his home in Edinburgh, where he’s preparing to embark on a 15-city U.S. book tour to promote his 16th Rebus novel, The Question of Blood.

The year was 1984. Rankin, then an unsavory-looking 24-year-old, was working toward his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh. Officially, he was crafting a thesis on post-modernism and the Scottish novel; in reality, he was framing John Rebus’ debut, Knots & Crosses. "I got an idea for a book about a cop but I didn’t read crime fiction at that time, which is very unusual among crime writers, not to come to it as a fan of the genre. And I didn’t know any cops. So I wrote to the top police officer in Edinburgh and explained that I was writing this police novel and could he help me," Rankin recalls.

"I was dispatched to this police station in Edinburgh, and I looked like a tramp. They said, you’re writing a book? They could barely believe it. They asked me what the plot was, and it happened to be very close to a case they were working on in real life. They thought that I was like John Doe in Seven or something; that I was coming into the police station and giving myself up to play games with them."

Rankin was escorted to the inquiry room and given the third degree. "I was about the only suspect they had in those days. It eventually became a murder case involving seven victims. That’s taking research a bit too far, really. For a few years after that, I didn’t go near the police, fearing the same thing would happen again."

Despite the awkward introduction, Rankin eventually wrote his way into the hearts of Scottish law enforcement officials. Several inspectors have become friends, giving the author access to the realistic procedural detail for which his books are rightly admired.

In The Question of Blood, Inspector Rebus is summoned to a sleepy Scottish coastal town where a former soldier has gunned down two students and injured a third at a posh private school before taking his own life. Rebus has a personal stake in the Columbine-like tragedy: one of the victims is his cousin.

Unfortunately, the good inspector is temporarily without the use of his hands, which are heavily bandaged after a scalding incident. And because his unusual injury coincided a little too closely with the house-fire death of a lowlife who has been stalking his sidekick, Siobhan Clarke, Rebus is once again on suspension.

The Question of Blood is laced with British musical references, not surprising considering that a group of young Goths (black-clad heavy metal fans) ultimately hold the key to the school shootings. It’s an ongoing feature of the series that has earned Rankin a rock-star following.

"The music is a good shorthand way to delineate character," Rankin says. "If you want to tell the reader a lot about a character in a small space, just tell them what their musical taste is. You’ll get their age, their background, whether they’re gregarious or a loner."

It was rock music that first inspired Rankin, though the prospect of participating in it was remote while he was growing up in a small coal-mining town north of Edinburgh. When punk exploded, the 18-year-old Rankin assembled a group called the Dancing Pigs that performed around Edinburgh in 1978-79. "We weren’t very good," he chuckles. "I was on vocals; singing would be putting it too strongly."

He followed that with a stint as a grape-picking swineherd in France. "We tramped the grapes the old-fashioned way in these huge wooden barrels and then I was supposed to feed all the bits of skin and pips and stuff to the pigs. But being a lazy kind of guy, I left it for a few days and the stuff started fermenting, so by the time I fed it to them it was alcoholic and they got incredibly drunk and one of them actually died of alcohol poisoning. So that was the end of my career as a swineherd. Perhaps the Dancing Pigs were a bit prescient."

Rankin subsequently worked as editor of Hi-Fi magazine "until I had an absolute state-of-the-art hi-fi system, at which point I promptly resigned, having gotten all of these freebies."

At 43, Rankin outsells Stephen King in the U.K., his face adorns London’s red double-decker buses and his brooding inspector now has a BBC television series of his own. In the course of 16 novels, he has depicted Edinburgh in such vivid detail that out-of-towners can now take a two-hour walking tour of Rebus’ various haunts, including the Oxford Bar, where Rankin still imbibes.

But Rankin warns that the clock is ticking on his desultory detective. "Rebus works in real time. In book one, he is 40 and now we’re up to book 16 and he’s 55, and you’ve got to retire at 60, so I’ve got a maximum of five more books left if I do a book a year. Then we’ll have a parting of the ways and Siobhan might become the main character. I honestly don’t know because I never think more than one book ahead. There is no game plan."

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Oxford, Mississippi.

Musician Reed Arvin hits new note with legal thrillers Although there’s action aplenty in The Last Goodbye, the real thrill in this thriller is tuning into the caustic and nimble mind of protagonist Jack Hammond. Ejected from his high-dollar Atlanta law firm over an affair with a client, Hammond now supports himself (and a gorgeous secretary who reads Pottery Barn catalogs) by representing impoverished defendants in criminal court. “The words that enable me to pay three dollars more than minimum wage to the beautiful Miss McClendon,” Hammond reflects, “are these: If you cannot afford an attorney, the court will appoint one for you.’ ” When one of his clients dies under peculiar circumstances, Hammond steps in to find out why. His snooping leads him into the arcane world of clinical drug testing and pairs him romantically with an alluring young opera singer who has some disturbing secrets of her own.

Speaking to BookPage from his home in Nashville, Arvin admits that he’s rather taken by this new character he’s created. “I’m pretty sure that the next book [after the one now in progress] will be a Jack Hammond book,” he says. “I love the fact that he has this sort of wry insight into life. Even when all hell is breaking loose, he sees the humor in it. That’s really attractive to me. I want that in my books. I’m not going to write dour, heavy, brooding stories.” The Last Goodbye is Arvin’s second mystery with a lawyer as hero. “Both my parents were lawyers,” he notes. “My mom was a judge. I like to say that I studied law at the Les and Kay Arvin Dinner Table School of Law. It was just in the air. However, I’m not particularly attracted to law as a profession, and I don’t write procedurals. Having a lawyer as a protagonist is great because it’s a way to enter human drama. A lawyer enters a life when things are going haywire, so that’s a great starting point to tell a story. But I’m not particularly attracted to legal minutiae.” A native of Kansas, Arvin has spent most of his life as a musician and record producer. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees both in piano from the University of North Texas and the University of Miami. “Miami is so multicultural,” he says. “I got involved in some tremendous Latin bands, bands that were playing Caribbean music, salsa bands, reggae bands. I got a tremendous education in life in different cultures, one that I could have never had without being in the music business. Then I came to Nashville.” Arvin arrived in Nashville “a good 20 years ago,” he recalls, and soon took a job playing keyboard in Amy Grant’s band. He toured and recorded with the pop/gospel diva for four years. After that, Grant’s advisors tapped him to produce records for contemporary Christian music artists. “But all during that time,” he says, “I kind of had in the back of my mind that I wanted to write. I loved books, I loved great writing and I always wondered, what if . . . ?” The Wind In The Wheat, Arvin’s debut novel, came out in 1996 and found him in familiar territory. It was about a gifted young singer who gets caught up in the Christian music industry. Alas, it attracted little notice. Then, in 2001, Scribner published his first thriller, The Will. “I feel like, in a lot of ways,” he says, “that The Will was the beginning of my real writing career. That’s when I became mainstream, signed with a real agent and got a great publisher.” Instead of Kansas, which was a major setting for his first two novels, Arvin opted to locate The Last Goodbye in Atlanta. “It’s really the center of the new, affluent black culture,” he explains. “It’s ground zero. It has more in common with the United Nations than it does magnolias.” (Although Hammond is white, his love interest and some of his foes are black.) Arvin handles race matter-of-factly, bowing neither to sentimentality nor political correctness. He reached this calm perspective, he says, through his work as a musician. “Music is similar to athletics in that it is really performance-based. If you can carry the freight, nobody cares where you came from. I spent my whole life working with Latins, blacks, whites, Asians. It didn’t matter. It was all performance-oriented: Can you play? So I don’t have a lot of politically correct baggage.” In plotting how The Last Goodbye murders would be done, Arvin dipped into real life and then anchored his findings with serious research. “I had cancer,” he says, “so I had a lot of personal experience with powerful drugs that can heal you but also leave their mark on you. My own story ends well. But I had an uncle who had a much more serious and lethal kind of cancer. He basically made it a two-year mission to try to stay alive on clinical trials. So I watched from a distance the sort of mixed blessing these trials can have. That got me interested in a clinical trial as a place to set a thriller.” To be certain he was scientifically on target, Arvin enlisted an expert on gene-based synthetic drug research and persuaded him to vet every page.

Arvin’s next book is set in Nashville and has a prosecutor as its main character. Despite his love of performing and producing, he vows that he’s totally committed to writing. “Around about the time The Will came out,” he says, “a lot of things happened to me: I got divorced, I got cancer, I changed careers, my dad had a heart attack. It was unbelievable. It’s like the five stresses that you’re supposed to get in a lifetime, I got in 90 days. That’s when I made some real choices about what I was going to do with the rest of my life and where I was going to head. I knew this was my second act.” Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

Tucked away in the closet of Michael Simon’s New York apartment is a roll of butcher paper that measures roughly three feet wide and 16 feet long. Unfurl it and you’ll discover a detailed roadmap of the intricately woven plot of his totally absorbing first novel, Dirty Sally, a detective thriller set in Austin, Texas, during the late 1980s.

"The plot was the biggest challenge," Simon says during a call to his home. "There are so many things going on in this book. They have to interact, and they have to be real and dramatic and develop in a compelling way."

Compelling, Dirty Sally certainly is. As the novel opens, detective Dan Reles, a native New Yorker and a Jew transplanted to Austin, is coming apart at the seams after the recent death of his partner, Joey Velez, the first non-white officer to make the city’s homicide squad. Reles’ weird, angry behavior after his partner’s fatal car crash makes him the subject of an internal affairs investigation. The highly publicized case of a young prostitute killed and dismembered in an Austin crack house offers Reles a way to salvage his career. So with the clock ticking, he sets out to identify the victim – whom the squad nicknames "Dirty Sally" – and find her murderer. The problem is that his investigation leads him to a series of shady real estate development deals that involve the city’s most powerful citizens. And, as it turns out, not all of Reles’ homicide department colleagues are eager to see him redeem himself.

Simon says it took something like five years and 15 drafts to engineer the dramatic intersections of scenes and storylines that make his first Dan Reles detective novel (he is now at work on the second book in the series) so difficult to put down. To support himself during his long construction project, Simon taught writing and acting in New York for a number of years and then took a job as a proofreader for an advertising agency. For three years he wrote every morning, went to work in the afternoon, came home late at night, went to bed, then got up and did the same thing all over again. "From the night I decided to write the book, I was never half-hearted about it," he says.

As Simon tells it, he was inspired to write Dirty Sally by a conversation with his brother, who was intent on writing a military thriller and thereby achieve fame, fortune and immortality in the process. "I thought, well, there must be a way I can get a piece of this," he says, laughing. In fact, six or seven other friends also boarded the thriller-writing bandwagon. But absolutely everybody else dropped out except Simon.

Part of what sustained him was the memory of the searing experiences he’d had as a probation officer in Austin, a job he took to support himself after his graduate fellowship at the University of Texas ran out. At that time Texas, which Simon says has a long history of imposing "ridiculously long prison sentences," had explosively overcrowded prisons and, as a result, had begun undersentencing dangerous felons, churning hard cases out into the parole system. "It’s not that I particularly believe in the prison system," Simon says, "but there are some people who shouldn’t be on the street."

The effect on Simon and his coworkers was profoundly demoralizing. "I think that was the core of me wanting to write this book about law enforcement, because the work itself can be so damaging. You develop this really dark humor and you eat a lot," he says.

Simon’s main character, detective Dan Reles, doesn’t overeat but he has the dark humor of a moral hero in an immoral situation. "When Dan makes a joke it’s a dark joke," Simon says. "There are things he finds disturbing and wrong, things that fill him with contempt. So he makes a joke about it and the joke lets off some tension, but it doesn’t make him happy."

An inverted moral universe suffused with a hard dark humor is the essence of a noir thriller, and in Dirty Sally, Simon offers his own unique contribution to the genre. "The structure of a regular mystery is politically conservative," Simon says. "You have an orderly world, then one utterly extreme crime takes place and the world is totally messed up, and then a detective comes in and solves the crime and the world is fine again." Simons says the masters of noir fiction writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler – turned this convention on its head: after the crime is solved, the world is "still awful."

Thus, one of the things that’s most surprising and daring about Simon’s version of the noir thriller is that he’s decided to locate its action in sunny, optimistic Austin. "I moved to Austin in the late 1980s," Simon says. "It was this incredibly beautiful town, clean, friendly. Then I got this funny job and suddenly I was looking at the other part of town, the poor part of town. I was seeing who was living by working really, really hard and who was living by doing something illegal or illicit: dealing drugs, working as a prostitute or as a pimp. And it shook up my perspective."

So Simon paints a gritty portrait of a police department divided by racial tensions, neighborhoods decimated by drugs, and a city whose financial and political power structure promotes privatization of public resources for personal gain. Through the murk of this moral and political corruption the emotionally wounded Dan Reles tries to get his man.

For all the background he manages to weave so adroitly into his tale, Simon says he "doesn’t mean Dirty Sally to be an issue-driven drama; this isn’t a political diatribe or a bumper sticker. What I really want is for the reader to enjoy the ride."

With its intricate weave of plotlines, authentic detail and strong, no-nonsense writing, Dirty Sally does indeed offer a good ride. A very good ride.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

Russian homicide detective Arkady Renko's cases have mirrored the historic upheavals within the Soviet Union during the past quarter of a century. He has battled his old-guard bosses and the KGB in Gorky Park, been thrown into exile aboard a Soviet trawler in Polar Star, returned to confront the rise of the post-Soviet Mafia in Red Square and, in a busman's holiday, investigated a friend's murder during a tour of Russia's orphan, Cuba, in Havana Bay.

In his latest adventure, Wolves Eat Dogs, the indomitable inspector confronts crimes against man and nature when a murder trail leads into the frightening, fascinating world of modern man's biggest technological blunder, Chernobyl.

When wealthy New Russian Pasha Ivanov falls (or is pushed) 11 stories to his death, Renko's business-as-usual superiors rule it a suicide, case closed. But a saltshaker found beneath the body leads Renko to an eerie discovery: Ivanov's sumptuous digs are white-hot with cesium 137, a deadly radioactive isotope.

Two years ago, popular suspense writer Martin Cruz Smith visited Chernobyl against the advice of almost everyone. Like his fictional alter ego, Smith listened to his instincts instead.

"When I first broached the subject of Chernobyl, everyone said that's the last thing anyone would want to read about, it's so grim," he says by phone from his home in San Rafael, California. "But when I went there, it was so much more interesting than I first thought. It was interesting to see people under such pressure. There was incredible heroism among the so-called liquidators who were cleaning up that mess. Many of them carried radioactive materials in their hands with absolutely no idea how dangerous that was, but some of them did understand and they sacrificed themselves." Many Americans assume Chernobyl was abandoned after the 1986 disaster. Not so. The 135,000 inhabitants of the two closest towns, Pripyat and Chernobyl, were evacuated, but the workers who manned the three functioning reactors and the liquidators who tried to contain the damage within the fourth reactor stayed behind. The last of the active Chernobyl reactors was finally shut down last year.

Smith recalls his first look at the sarcophagus that surrounds, though hardly "contains," the world-famous number four reactor; radioactivity from it continues to seep into the groundwater that feeds the Dnepr River.

"It looks like a monument to a disaster," he says. "It strongly resembles a cage, a cage that looks very impressive at first sight but then the more you study and know about it, the flimsier it becomes." In fact, Chernobyl has become the unofficial sick joke of the once-proud Ukraine. There was the unnecessary low-power test that triggered the chain reaction that caused a deadly fireball to blow the roof off the tower, contaminating the Northern Hemisphere. Then came an unexplainable three-day silence from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev during which children played in the green foam, the plant's protection against radioactive release. After the forced evacuation of Pripyat, the government built a new town, Slavutych, on a radioactive site it called its "cesium patch." "Pripyat really lets you know that things have gone very much awry; you walk into a city of 50,000 and you're the only one," Smith recalls. "But then they moved the workers to Slavutych and planted them on radioactive ground. How could they screw up so badly?" Workers clad in camouflage commute daily from Slavutych to the reactors, passing through radiation detectors frequently. A microdot of cesium or plutonium invisible to the naked eye is enough to send a Geiger counter needle off the gage. In his week inside the Zone of Exclusion, Smith carried a dosimeter constantly.

"Some of the veterans get these cavalier attitudes. I had a guide with me in a Pripyat amusement park who called me over and said, Put your dosimeter here.' So I put it down and the needle just flew off, a thousand times normal. I said, why are we standing here?! It was just a random spot in the town that was not marked by a stake and warnings." In Smith's new novel, one of Ivanov's vice presidents is found in Pripyat with his throat slashed. Murder means little in a town that has seen so much death. To solve the case, Renko enlists the help of Eva, a sexy but deeply cynical physician who treats the scavengers and old Ukrainians who have returned to Chernobyl despite its deadly toxicity.

The title of the novel, Wolves Eat Dogs, refers to a leitmotif expertly woven throughout the narrative. Wolves in fact have returned to Chernobyl in great numbers, as have wild boar, deer and other wildlife, all of it radioactive from wandering through the so-called "black villages" and numerous hot zones that will remain for thousands of years. For Chernobyl, and indeed the former Soviet Union, explosive change has brought about a new natural order, a wolf-eat-dog world.

In retrospect, Smith considers Chernobyl one of the first irreparable cracks that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. "The Russian authorities would like to say it was human error, that 15 fools got together and did this thing," he says. "But in fact, the reactor was unstable at low levels of output and this piece of information had not been relayed to the technicians who were running the test." Smith says the catastrophic events at Chernobyl brought to light the secrecy at the heart of the Soviet system. "The Russian people definitely saw it as the worst example of that," he notes, and the three-day delay before the general alarm was issued led to "a real collapse in the credibility and belief in the state." Jay MacDonald happened to be driving through Middletown, Pennsylvania, during the Three Mile Island nuclear incident.

Literary novelist takes on the Corleone family Mark Winegardner is dead tired. The past two years of his life have been spent holed up in monastic artist colonies like Yaddo for months at a time, writing around the clock. Down the stretch, during the last eight weeks of writing, he literally slept every other night, a man on fire determined to make the most of an opportunity most writers would kill for: to write the sequel to The Godfather.

For years, Random House editor Jonathan Karp had urged Mario Puzo to revisit the Corleone family: What happened to crooner Johnny Fon-tane? Irish consigliere Tom Hagen? Michael and Kay? Puzo wasn’t interested, but he had no objection to his family continuing the saga after his death. Three years ago, Karp, Puzo’s oldest son Anthony and literary agent Neil Olson discretely contacted dozens of writers, some household names, soliciting proposals for the first sequel, The Godfather Returns. Short of cloning, they could not have found a better successor than Winegardner. Like Puzo when he wrote his 1969 runaway bestseller, Winegardner is a highly regarded literary novelist (Crooked River Burning, Veracruz Blues) in his early 40s who hasn’t delved previously into the Sicilian underworld. He is also at the top of his game, eager for a broader audience and fully cognizant of the pressure and perils of following in oversized footsteps.

“When I saw the request for proposals, I asked Jon to level with me. I said, Look, before I invest a lot of time into this, tell me the truth: at the end of the day, you’re just going to pick some super-famous crime novelist, aren’t you?” Winegardner says from his home in Tallahassee, where he heads the creative writing program at Florida State University. “And he said, Nope. I can’t promise you we’ll choose you, but I can promise you we will choose a writer a lot like you.” Many of the proposals played it safe by suggesting prequels about the life of the godfather, Vito Corleone, affording the author a relatively blank canvas. Wine-gardner, however, accepted the greater challenge: to devise a story that accommodates not only the original novel but also the two popular film sequels.

“That was the crazy part. I didn’t have to do that; I just decided to do that,” he says.

“I could have theoretically ignored everything in the movies that didn’t come from the book. Instead, I kind of maneuver around them. I decided early on that I would neither mention the stuff that happens in the movies but not the book, nor would I contradict it. It took me a long time to work out.” Winegardner found his setting and main inspiration in the late 1950s, when Don Michael Corleone is struggling for a way out of organized crime. “I knew for sure that I could do this when I realized that Michael Corleone’s greatest yearning, to be legitimate, was an aspect of the story that had never been resolved. It is somehow resolved by the time Godfather III starts; he’s succeeded in a mixed way that he’s resigned to, but it is absolutely unresolved in Godfather II. I thought, holy cow, we need to see how he succeeds or fails. When did he get to the half-baked success that, at the beginning of Godfather III, it seems he has had for decades?” Winegardner picks up numerous secondary characters from the cutting room floor, including Michael Corleone’s contentious brother Fredo, Sonny’s widow and family (Sonny’s son Frankie here becomes a Notre Dame star linebacker nicknamed “The Hit-man”) and yes, the lovable Johnny Fontane. (For readers who feel a bit lost, The Godfather Returns includes a chronology of the two novels and the films, as well as an extensive list of characters.) Puzo would have approved of the way Winegardner seamlessly weaves his plot into the Godfather story to produce a singularly enjoyable mid-quel that’s lighter on its feet than the original. Winegardner freely acknowledges that the hundreds of post-Godfather novels, films and TV shows, from Donnie Brasco and Goodfellas to “The Sopranos,” enabled him to infuse The Godfather Returns with both humor and realistic sex that weren’t possible in 1969.

“The Godfather is a masterpiece of storytelling, but it is a little bit of a humorless book,” he says. “I know about the Mafia, both from talking with some minor guys and reading more than a hundred books about it, and these are not humorless men. I had the benefit of all the Mafia lore and was better able to go for a certain realism. Puzo just didn’t have access to that at the New York Public Library.” Winegardner isn’t concerned that he’ll lose his own fans by continuing Puzo’s tale. “This is my own work,” he insists. “I was circling around this subject matter my entire career. If they had hired a novelist who had written a lot about the Mafia already, they would have somebody who had already spent some of his capital on this. I had a clean plate. Heap it on, I’m ready to go.” He certainly wouldn’t refuse an offer to write another sequel. “I think people thought it was easier to not have to weave in around the movies, but I feel like hey, wait a minute, I just did the hardest part I weaved around one of the greatest movies of all time and came out the other side,” he says. “If anyone is going to advance the ball down the field from here, it’s going to be me.”

There is a sense of symmetry as I sit in a cozy cabin overlooking the Grand Canyon's Bright Angel Trail and begin collating the notes of my interview with Southwestern mystery author Tony Hillerman. Hillerman's latest novel, Skeleton Man, takes place in the Grand Canyon, reuniting veteran Native American policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee for an investigation into the aftermath of a plane crash, the worst airline disaster of its day, which took place more than 40 years before. Among the victims was a diamond dealer carrying a briefcase full of diamonds, one of which has recently surfaced in a local crime.

It's another fascinating scenario from Hillerman, an Oklahoma native and longtime journalist who launched his Native American mystery series in 1970 with the publication of The Blessing Way. Since then, he has turned out 15 more Navajo mysteries, as well as several other novels, nonfiction books about the West, essay collections and a memoir. From his home in Albuquerque, Hillerman talked to BookPage about his long career and his new book. What was intended as a short interview turned into an hour-long conversation on a variety of topics, ranging from Grand Canyon history to homeland security, only a small portion of which are covered here.

BookPage: Can you tell us a bit about the 1956 airline crash over the Grand Canyon that plays a pivotal role in Skeleton Man?
Tony Hillerman: Sure. The crash took place on June 30, 1956. Two planes were involved, a United Airlines DC-7 and a TWA Constellation. There has been speculation that one of the passengers requested that the pilot turn the plane a bit to afford a better view of the canyon, but I think that is largely speculation. In any event, there was a midair crash, and 128 passengers and crew were killed. It actually caused the FAA to revamp their regulations regarding airspace usage, regulations that remain in place to this day.

BP : You've summoned Joe Leaphorn out of retirement to take part in Skeleton Man. Are there any parallels between Leaphorn and yourself in this regard?
TH: [laughs] I am 82 years old. I imagine that I will keep on writing as long as anyone wants to keep reading. In fact, Leaphorn figures quite prominently in my upcoming novel [a follow-up to Skeleton Man], which will tie up some loose ends such as the ongoing romance between Jim Chee and Bernie Manuelito.

BP: Jim Chee is, as you say, something of a romantic, while Joe Leaphorn is a bit of a pragmatist by comparison. Do you identify more with one than the other?
TH: I would say that Leaphorn is more an extension of my personality than Chee. He is closer to me in age and attitude, and he can be a bit grouchy from time to time.

BP: Your books are icons of mystery fiction; you have virtually invented the subgenre of Native American mysteries. How do you account for their ongoing popularity?
TH: You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart. But an author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place. You try to create characters who invite a strong reaction from readers, whether pity, contempt, empathy, whatever.

BP: A number of television adaptations of your Leaphorn/Chee novels have been aired over the past few years. What is your reaction to seeing your characters on the big (or small) screen?
TH: Well, Wes Studi [who plays Joe Leaphorn in PBS adaptations] is perfect. In fact, when an image of Joe Leaphorn crosses my mind, it is Wes Studi's face I see. Adam Beach [who plays Jim Chee] is an excellent actor as well, but much too handsome.

BP: This has nothing whatsoever to do with the current book, but Finding Moon, the tale of an average fellow who goes to Vietnam to discover what has happened to his missing brother, has always been a particular favorite of mine. Can you give us some insight into how that book came about?
TH: [laughs again] Well, you certainly know the right questions to ask! Finding Moon is a favorite of mine as well. It would have been my first book. It was originally set in the Belgian Congo during their civil war in the aftermath of the Belgian armed forces' pullout. What with work and family obligations, I wasn't able to get it finished quickly, and then the situation changed in the Belgian Congo, rendering some of my plot ideas unworkable. I kept it on a shelf for all those years, and was able to rework the bones of the story using Vietnam as the geographic focal point. Although I wasn't able to get a visa for Vietnam, I was able to talk with swift boat veterans and others to get a feel for the time and place, and I visited a tropical prison in the Philippines to get a sense of what a Vietnamese prison might have been like.

BP: Now that I've posed a number of questions that either I or our readers were curious about, is there anything that you would like to add?
TH: Well, I have another new book called Kilroy Was There. It was published by Kent State University as a World War II memorial. I was asked to write the text for the book, but I replied that I was "much too busy." Then I saw some of the photographs by Frank Kessler and I knew I had to do it. The photos depict down-and-dirty street fighting, the realities of war with no sugarcoating or romanticizing.

Back in the late 1970s, when Jeff Lindsay was in graduate school in theater at Carnegie Mellon, he had a directing teacher from Romania who had a concept called "illegal laughter." "Ve are making the audience to laugh," the funny, theatrical Lindsay says, imitating the accent of his former professor, "and then ve are making them to feel they haff broken the law for doing it."

That, essentially, is the effect Lindsay strives for in Dearly Devoted Dexter, his second detective thriller featuring Dexter Morgan, who assumes the guise of a "mild-mannered forensic lab rat," working by day as a blood-spatter analyst for the Miami police department, but by night as a serial killer, albeit one who only goes after bad guys. Here, as in his well-regarded first novel, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Lindsay achieves his ends with a pleasing mix of grisly description, devious wit and clever wordplay.

"I want somebody to laugh, then feel the goose bumps on the back of their neck," Lindsay says, elaborating on his premise during a call to his home near Sarasota, Florida. "To go: that’s funny – who’s behind me?"

It takes a great deal of skill to provoke simultaneously such divergent responses in a reader. One reason Lindsay is able to pull it off is that he makes the monstrous Dexter understandable, even appealing. Dexter tells his story from his own inimitable perspective. And part of that perspective is his frequent assertion that he is not actually a human being. Of course Dexter only gets involved in the hunt for the murderous Dr. Danco, a veteran of the United States’ covert operations in El Salvador now bent on revenge against those he thinks have betrayed him, because Dexter’s sister, Deb, a Miami police officer, begs him to help her rescue her boyfriend from Danco’s clutches. And then there is the darkly farcical scene – Lindsay’s favorite – in which Dexter stumbles into becoming engaged to his girlfriend Rita. But why ruin a reader’s shocked laughter by saying too much about Lindsay’s deft storytelling?

Of his main character’s belief that he is not human, Lindsay says, "There has to have been a time when instead of saying, thank God I’m not human, Dexter was saying, why can’t I be like everyone else? Nobody is born a villain. You know that about people. That understanding is part of basic acting."

Lindsay’s reference to acting is typical. He spent much of his life pursuing an acting career, including almost 15 years in Hollywood. "One of the reasons that I didn’t really rocket to the top in Hollywood is that I was trying to do a little bit of everything," Lindsay says. "I was running a theater company with some friends, and I was writing plays, and acting and directing and doing comedy. I was in the ABC and Paramount new talent development program for comedy. And, oh yeah, there was my rock and roll band."

Eventually his wife, Hilary Hemingway, a writer and documentary filmmaker herself (and, yes, the niece of that Hemingway), suggested he concentrate on one thing. "All along it seems like I’ve been getting gentle hints about writing," Lindsay says. "When I was an actor, somebody came up to me and said, the guy who was writing our new play got sick. Want to do it? And suddenly I was a playwright. And when I was doing comedy, friends would ask me to help write their routines. So suddenly I was a comedy writer. In everything I tried to do, I ended up writing. So finally I said, okay, I get the message."

After the couple moved back to Florida, where both had been born and raised, Lindsay developed a routine of getting up at 4 a.m. and writing until it was time to get his kids ready for school. Lindsay and Hemingway have three daughters, ages 16, 9 and almost 2. Hemingway worked as a television news producer and Lindsay taught a bit at New University, hosted a couple of PBS shows and wrote what he calls "a semi-syndicated newspaper column" on fatherhood. "It started one year when Hilary was producing the evening news and I was home writing," Lindsay says. "Since she left for work before the kids came home from school and got home after they’d gone to bed, I was the only parent around. So it was about the adventures of a tough, super-macho intellectual with two daughters buying the first bra and so on. I think it ran in four papers."

Lindsay’s bright moment of inspiration for the first Dexter Morgan novel came at a Kiwanis Club luncheon, where he was the guest speaker. "I was vice president of the Key Club in high school," Lindsay assures BookPage readers, "so I don’t have anything against the Kiwanis. But I was sitting there at the head table looking out at the audience getting ready to speak, and the idea just popped into my head that sometimes serial murder isn’t a bad thing. I sort of blew off the talk and started scribbling on napkins."

The success of the first book in the series, Lindsay says, allowed the family to stop living week-to-week. "We’re now going in six-month chunks," he says wryly. "And that’s a big improvement."

But that success also complicated work on his second book, Dearly Devoted Dexter. "Writing at any time is difficult. Because in order to do it you have to leave yourself wide open, which lets in a lot of stuff you don’t want to deal with. That’s always problematic, dealing with the other stuff and still maintaining focus. I am a total neurotic, so there were times when I was thinking, the first book wasn’t very good; why don’t I just die? And there were times when I was thinking, how can I write a book as good as the first book? It went back and forth like that."

But now Dearly Devoted Dexter is finished. It’s a darn good read. And Jeff Lindsay is hard at work on a third book in the Dexter Morgan series.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Who would have thought it? A prim 1930s British gumshoe is one of the freshest, most modern heroines in recent memory. With the third installment in author Jacqueline Winspear's mystery series, Maisie Dobbs takes her place in the upper echelon of literary female detectives, right next to Kinsey Millhone and Kay Scarpetta—the main difference being that unlike her thoroughly modern counterparts, Maisie Dobbs lives in post-World War I London. In Pardonable Lies, we find Maisie Dobbs' private investigation practice flourishing. Her compassionate yet methodical approach to her work has made her services much sought after. Still, although more than a decade has passed, her gruesome work as a nurse in a casualty clearing station in France during the war continues to plague her. When the powerful Sir Cecil Lawton hires her to discover the truth about his son's death while serving as a pilot in the war, Dobbs is forced to return to France and face her own awful memories.

When the powerful Sir Cecil Lawton hires her to discover the truth about his son's death while serving as a pilot in the war, Maisie Dobbs is forced to return to France and face her own awful memories.

Rich with historical detail and packing several interwoven mysteries for Maisie to untangle, Pardonable Lies is as stylish as a whodunit gets. Winspear paints a haunting picture of how it must have been to be young at that moment in history, with a gingerly hopeful world still reeling but also slowly rebuilding after the war. The devastating human toll of World War I cannot be overstated the war virtually decimated an entire generation of young men. It is estimated that two million young women faced the prospect of living their lives without husbands. Very much a woman of her time, Maisie in some ways also resembles a single woman circa 2005 she not only owns her own business, she has collected an eclectic group of friends, found herself a handsome young doctor to date and even is considering buying her own home.

"Life was never going to be as these women had expected it to be," says Winspear, who spoke to BookPage from her home in southern California, where she had just returned from back-to-back trips to New York and England to promote her current book and research her next one. "They had to make a life alone, and were fiercely independent. They had to work; they had to find companionship in other ways. The whole period is one of immense change and turmoil."

Long fascinated with the role of women between the first and second world wars, Winspear was eager to continue exploring this new reality for women in Pardonable Lies. Maisie clearly feels the pressure of making her business a success, and she also experiences the subtle prejudice against spinster women when she seeks a loan to buy a home. Winspear's fascinating peek into the life of a long-ago generation adds depth that makes the Maisie Dobbs series so difficult to define: it's part mystery and part historical fiction, with a dash of love story thrown in.

Although Winspear has won Agatha Awards for both Maisie Dobbs and Birds of a Feather, the first two books in the series, she is still amazed when she hears one of her books described as a mystery that reads like a novel. "Well, why shouldn't it?" asks Winspear.

Although she's a fan of mystery writers such as Patricia Cornwell and Jonathan Kellerman, Winspear admits she is more likely to read nonfiction, particularly biographies, which satisfy her nosy tendencies. "Because I write mysteries, I very rarely read mysteries," she says. "I know that's a sin—or is it?" She finds herself drawn to the genre as an author because of the particular challenges of writing a compelling mystery that also captures human elements.

"A mystery offers an enormous landscape with which to work," she says. "With a mystery, everything must come right in the end as much as possible. Yet life doesn't give perfect endings. Life is a journey. So this challenges an author: give readers something that rings true, and that also satisfies them." To make sure Pardonable Lies did ring true, Winspear paid a visit to the site of a casualty clearing station cemetery in Belgium. It was to these mobile hospitals that the wounded were brought in the middle of combat, and they were the scenes of some of the bloodiest, most horrific moments of the war as doctors and nurses of many nationalities worked to save as many lives as possible.

A pivotal scene in the book has Maisie returning to such a spot, and Winspear wanted to be sure she got it right.

"The rain was sideways across the land," Winspear recalls of her pilgrimage. "The cemetery was no bigger than someone's backyard garden. It was a very emotional experience. I wanted to know, how would it be if you had spent a significant point in your girlhood where you saw such terrible things?" This painstaking research and loyalty to the truth of the time in which Maisie lives is important to Winspear, but she is careful never to sacrifice story for the sake of historical accuracy. A graceful writer, Winspear brings 1930s London alive, describing the clothes, the food and the manners of the era without ever getting bogged down in details.

"The truth of the matter is, I'm a storyteller first and foremost," she says. "Everything else has to be in support of the story. I just want to reflect the spirit of the era." She suspects current events might have something to do with the success of the Maisie Dobbs series. "We're living in what are perceived as uncertain times in this country," Winspear said. " When you read something historical, you know we got through it and life goes on. When you read a mystery, you know that in the end everything will be right in the world. We need some of that."

Winspear, who moved to the United States from England in 1990, is already at work on the fourth Maisie Dobbs book. She pledges to continue the series as long as she feels the stories continue to offer something original.

"It has to be fresh for me," she said. "Maisie Dobbs has to grow and change like we all do. If she's not, it's stagnant. A reader comes back to serial characters to see how they've changed."

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

Laura Lippman’s crime fiction isn’t torn from the headlines in quite the way one might expect from a former news reporter for the Baltimore Sun. In fact, Lippman’s well-crafted, thought-provoking private eye series featuring Tess Monaghan, as well as her equally compelling stand-alone mysteries, tend to focus on the very people who don’t make the headlines: the poor, the disenfranchised, the minorities and the young people who frequently fall through the sometimes gaping cracks in our human services.

Though she long ago clocked out of daily journalism, Lippman stays close to the poverty and social issues she used to cover by working at a Baltimore soup kitchen on weekends. It was there that she met the struggling teens that inspired Lloyd Jupiter, a homeless, 15-year-old African American who stumbles into very big trouble in Lippman’s ninth Tess Monaghan adventure, No Good Deeds.

It is Tess’ live-in boyfriend Crow who performs good deeds by delivering food to local food kitchens. On his rounds, he encounters Lloyd, who tries to jack him for $5 to change a flat tire that Crow suspects the teenager had caused just minutes before. Instead, Crow offers him shelter from the winter cold. Tess is wary of the troubled kid at her dinner table until, by chance, he indicates he has secret knowledge about the death of Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Youssef, whose recent murder has all the earmarks of an unofficial cover-up. When word of Lloyd’s secret brings the feds, the DEA and the FBI down on Tess, Crow takes Lloyd into hiding in hopes of keeping him alive until the case is solved. As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished.

" This novel started out as a straight-up homage to Robert Parker’s Early Autumn, in which Spenser takes this kid out into the country and they build a house together and he changes his life. I just loved that book," Lippman says. "But once I created Lloyd Jupiter, I just realized that it would be utterly false to solve all the problems in Lloyd’s life."

Realism above all is central to Lippman’s fiction, even if it means sacrificing the warm-fuzzy endings we all wish for.

"When you’re 15, you find your parents embarrassing no matter what; imagine being 15 and your mom is a heroin addict who is nodding off next to you at the soup kitchen. I don’t know how to say to that kid, well, just work harder, go to school and you’ll be fine. I feel like that is just a callous lie in some ways," she says.

"We’re asking these kids to be geniuses of survival. We don’t expect every kid coming up in a poor neighborhood to have the amazing skills of a LeBron James, we don’t view that as reasonable, but we do kind of ask or assume that they can be in the 99th percentile of survival ability. I was hoping in writing No Good Deeds that people would open their hearts just a little bit to just how difficult it is."

Lippman is equally committed to keeping Tess real.

"The joke in my household is that I like to write characters that are smaller than life," she says. "She’s really flawed; she was always meant to be that, because personally, I don’t like reading about perfect people. I don’t know any, and if I did I would probably find them annoying. I didn’t want Tess to be my fantasy projection. In some ways, I’m a lot smarter than Tess. I always wanted her to be realistic. She throws up in trash cans," Lippman laughs.

An interesting metamorphosis does occur for Tess over the course of No Good Deeds.

"For the average person, the kinds of choices that a kid like Lloyd Jupiter makes are just baffling, they go against everything we think we know about the value of hard work and going to school and paying attention. But as time goes on, Tess herself becomes increasingly skeptical of authority, is scared to tell the truth, doesn’t know who she can trust, and her situation comes to mirror Lloyd’s."

Lippman has always had a strong affinity for the juvenile characters that manage to work their way into the heart of her stories. But expect Tess to have a child of her own any time soon. "I don’t think Tess can have a baby and continue in this series," Lippman says. "I think she could get married but I think the minute you give your character a child, the reader’s tolerance for some of the things Tess does just disappears. If she risks herself, then she risks her child losing a mother. I’ll never say never, but I can’t see it for Tess right now."

After all, Tess has taken on iconic status for Baltimore in the same way Spenser did for Boston and Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch did for Los Angeles. "One of the spoilers I tell readers is, if you see a character of mine who doesn’t like Baltimore very much, you know there’s something wrong with that guy," Lippman chuckles.

Her reportorial eye for detail, understated prose style and emotional realism have elevated Lippman to the A-list of literary crime writers alongside Lehane, Connelly, Harlan Coben, Robert Crais and George Pelecanos. Lippman suspects the best contemporary literature can now be found in the mystery genre.

"Raymond Chandler said that the difference between literary fiction and crime fiction is that the ordinary mystery gets published and the ordinary literary novel does not. I don’t think that’s true anymore. I love my genre. Why would I want to transcend it? Why would I want to break out of it? It’s a big territory, but the really interesting work is being done at the borderlands."

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Oxford, Mississippi.

Kate Atkinson has spent her afternoon stuck in traffic. It's hardly an ideal way to pass a day, but after finally making it to her home in Edinburgh, Scotland, the best-selling author sounds undaunted even effervescent in a telephone interview. The cheerful Scottish lilt in her voice probably doesn't hurt.

Of course, Atkinson has a lot to be happy about. She rocketed to success with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which beat out Salman Rushdie to win the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1995. Critics heaped more accolades on her most recent novel Case Histories, including some unimaginably high praise from Stephen King (more on that later). In her latest book, One Good Turn, we revisit Jackson Brodie, the now retired detective from Case Histories. Brodie finds himself at the Edinburgh Arts Festival just in time to become enmeshed in a growing scandal that includes a frightening road-rage incident and the murder of a has-been comic.

Atkinson manages to keep tabs on a host of engaging characters in addition to Brodie, including depressed mystery writer Martin Canning, police detective Louise Monroe and feisty Gloria Hatter, wife of an unscrupulous homebuilder whose illegal practices are about to catch up with him. It's Gloria a 60-something woman who is arguably the soul of the book with whom Atkinson most identifies.

"Gloria is me," Atkinson says with a laugh. "She's the closest to me of all characters I've ever written. She's very strong and secretive, although she doesn't appear to be secretive. She's powerful yet disenfranchised. She likes rules and likes to obey rules. She wants people to do things properly. She's become fascist in her old age. I really feel myself becoming that way." Gloria, who despises her husband's deplorable business dealings and yearns for a clean break, also happens to live in the same Edinburgh suburb, known as the Grange, where Atkinson lives. "I've never brought a character so close to home," she says.

The characters of One Good Turn, including Brodie, who is drifting through retirement, seem to be struggling to find their way. Atkinson sees this as a reflection of the ups and downs of real life.

"I never see them as miserable, unhappy characters," she says. "They're just complex. Most people have fractured lives and are unhappy. I kind of see them as normal people." Such richly imagined characters set Atkinson's books apart from many mysteries, in which the unsolved case generally takes precedence over character development. Despite the success of Case Histories and the subject matter of One Good Turn, Atkinson actually does not consider herself a crime writer.

"People always want to ask a genre question when I write a book," she said. "It's just the book I'm writing. I was aware when I wrote Case Histories that it would be perceived as crime fiction. But I didn't feel I was writing a crime novel. It was just my novel with crime in it." As it turns out, the genre question is not the only thing readers want to ask Atkinson about when she hits the road to promote a new book. While grateful for the support of her fans, Atkinson still is shocked at the level of familiarity some people assume when she appears at book readings. In fact, the character of Martin Canning reflects Atkinson's fascination with the dilemma of being a well-known author who is actually quite private.

"I was once asked by two women at an event how often I had sex!" she recalls. "People think they're intimate with you from reading your books. I never think of giving myself away like that." What Atkinson does give consistently is clever, intoxicating storytelling that keeps readers guessing until the end. One Good Turn is a fast-paced, intricately woven tale of mistaken identity and bad behavior. Atkinson's new novel is even more intriguing thanks to its colorful backdrop: Edinburgh's annual arts festival, a booming mix of dance, music, theater and opera that takes over the Scottish capital (and in fact was responsible for the traffic jam that tied her up all afternoon). Atkinson brings her hometown's quirky festival to life, offering the perfect setting for murder and mayhem. It is a romp of a read that makes good on the promise of Atkinson's earlier efforts.

Which brings us back to Stephen King. In 2005, the author and Entertainment Weekly columnist named Case Histories his favorite book of the year, calling it the literary equivalent of a triple axel and the best mystery of the decade. In King's opinion, this placed Atkinson head and shoulders above some of his other favorite authors from that year, including heavy hitters J.K. Rowling, Ian McEwan, George Pelecanos and Cormac McCarthy. When this is mentioned, Atkinson laughs uproariously, still sounding more than a bit disbelieving.

When King's column appeared, Atkinson recalled, her publicist "forwarded the quote to me in an e-mail, and wrote 'Holy Cow!' with 100 exclamation points. It's a quote you could not buy. That was just a gift, really. It will now be on every book!" And may there be many more Atkinson books on which to plaster that gift. 

Amy Scribner is a writer in Olympia, Washington.

Just weeks away from moving into her new dream home, best-selling mystery writer Elizabeth George is having second thoughts about the weather. Said dream home, you see, is situated on Whidbey Island in the shadow of the rainy Cascade Mountains of Washington State. She and her husband Tom have been overseeing its construction for three years from their Seattle condo and are ready to embrace the bucolic country life. Still, George is worried about the notorious Northwest rain—she’s afraid there may not be enough of it.

"I’m a [stormy] weather girl, I love weather," George admits. "The 34 years I spent in Southern California were really torture for me because I love it when it rains. I always have, ever since I was a child, because when it was rainy out, we were allowed to read and when it was sunny out, my mom always wanted us to go out and play. I’m exactly the opposite of most people; I find extended sunshine very, very depressing. It’s very weird."

Her atmospheric preference certainly helps lend a soaked-to-the-skin authenticity to her 14 best-selling British mysteries that feature noble-born Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, his working-class assistant Barbara Havers and his wife, Lady Helen Clyde Lynley, who was shot and killed by a young assailant in last year’s shocker With No One as Witness.

Fans left wondering about Lady Helen’s murderer will be richly rewarded in What Came Before He Shot Her, a prequel of sorts that tracks the events leading up to the crime from the assailant’s point of view.

As the story opens, three siblings—15-year-old Ness Campbell, 11-year-old Joel and seven-year-old Toby—are left to fend for themselves in racially mixed North Kensington when their grandmother dumps them on their decidedly non-parental Aunt Kendra and jets back to Jamaica. When Ness becomes tragically involved with sex and drugs and Toby retreats into an imaginary world of his own, Joel tries desperately to keep his family out of the child welfare system by seeking protection from Blade, a neighborhood drug dealer. Events beyond his control eventually lead him to the Lynley doorstep in Belgravia with a pistol in his hand.

In Joel’s descent, the author explores some heartbreaking truths about disenfranchisement, race, poverty and the plight of children caught in a world they can neither understand nor escape.

"There are so many kids who are basically good people to whom life has dealt a very, very difficult hand of cards that they play as best they can, sometimes with tragic results," she says.

George initially planned to incorporate Joel’s story in With No One as Witness. "My original intention in the previous book was to create something called an hourglass plot, in which two parallel novels run along and then meet in one terrible moment in time, which of course would be Helen Lynley’s death, and then they go on their separate ways again," she explains. "But as I wrote, I began to see that, in order to do the Joel story justice, I was going to end up with a novel that was about 1,500 pages long with a cast of characters like something out of a Russian novel. I thought that what might be more interesting would be to remove the Joel story and then create an entire novel just about this little boy, so that’s what I did."

George is no stranger to working with children, having taught English for 14 years in Southern California. She’s also familiar with the Kensington area of London, where she’s had a flat since 1995. But it took a variety of influences to capture the Anglo-Caribbean patois of the streets.

"I have always watched a great deal of British television, so that was helpful. Also, having read a couple of novels where that was used also helped. The work of Courttia Newland, a young British writer, was extremely helpful to me, because his entire book, The Scholar, is written this way. I was able to examine that and see how he was structuring language," she says.

By now, George is comfortable being known as the most famous British writer who is not British—she was born in Ohio and raised in what is now California’s Silicon Valley. Still, new fans are often shocked to hear her American accent.

"Stylistically, I have always written more like a British or European writer than an American writer," she says. "Setting the books in England gives me much more leeway to do that, I think."

George became an Anglophile at an early age during the British invasion.

"It was right at the time that almost everything associated with pop culture in the United States was British in origin. There was the Beatles and all the groups that followed them, and Mary Quant from London was defining fashion, and motion pictures were introducing us to Michael Caine and Terence Stamp and the Redgraves. My cultural awareness was really informed by things British, so I had a natural interest and inclination toward that part of the world and it just never died."

Although her next novel will return to the Lynley series, George is open to attempting another stand-alone if the opportunity presents itself. "If I did a book similar to this, I would probably choose something tangentially related to another novel, and write that character’s story," she says.

Would this "British" writer ever set a novel in the U.S.?

"I wouldn’t shy away from it if I felt that I had a compelling story to tell in a location that really worked for me," George says. "Location is crucial to my books. I’ve been careful to go to places to make sure that I am going to feel that mystical or visceral connection that allows me to say yes, this is it, this is the place I’m going to write about."

A native of Washington State, Jay MacDonald now makes his home in sunny Austin, Texas.