Two-time Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke’s  latest novel, Rain Gods, finds the crime master at the top of his game. Burke, best known as the author of numerous books starring his Southern sleuths Dave Robicheaux and Billy Bob Holland, has also crafted other works of fiction that transcend the mystery genre, including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Lost Get-Back Boogie. Burke is that rare thriller writer who can combine gritty plotting with colorful characters and poetic descriptions of physical settings, while also managing to neatly circumscribe the action with a noirish sense of the sociopolitical American landscape.

Rain Gods is set into motion when the dead bodies of nine young Thai women—human “mules” in a heroin smuggling scheme—are discovered in a remote South Texas churchyard. Sheriff Hackberry Holland—Korean War vet, former ACLU lawyer, and reformed drinker and contrite ex-womanizer—takes on the investigation, which reaches into many sleazy worlds but mainly pits him against a formidable yet strangely compelling madman named Preacher Collins. The strong narrative offers a starkly realized Texas backdrop with occasional echoes of his beloved Louisiana, a healthy amount of violence and suspense, and a continuously intriguing whodunit feel that will satisfy his many fans. Burke took the time to answer a few questions about the new novel from his home in Montana.

Your protagonist, Sheriff Hackberry Holland, is 74, has chronic back pain, night terrors about his Korean War POW experience, has sworn off drink, and now doggedly chases bad guys in a wide-open—some might say godforsaken—Texas landscape. What inspired you to develop this character, and can we expect to see him as the star of future novels?
Hack first appears in my work in three short stories contained in the collection titled The Convict. He is also the narrator of my third published novel, Lay Down my Sword and Shield. I think he's one of most intriguing characters I have written about, and I suspect I will be writing more about him as well as the rest of the Holland family.

In the course of Rain Gods, it is suggested that Holland and his nemesis, Preacher Collins, are “two sides of the same coin.” Does either one bear any resemblance to the coin that is James Lee Burke?
My own life is an enormous yawn. I think that's the reason I'm often invited to speak before groups of insomniacs.

Two current events are referenced in Rain Gods that seem crucial to the narrative and character development: Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War. How do you think these events have affected American society?
The antagonist in the novel is a man known as Preacher Jack Collins. He's narcissistic, messianic, and convinced that he is the left hand of god. Needless to say, he's an extremely dangerous man. The novel has many symbolic overtones. We live in a time when men who in my view are absolutely ruthless have hijacked Christianity and used it for their own agenda.

With its South Texas setting, Rain Gods automatically conjures a strong sense of border politics and the issue of Hispanic immigration. Holland’s investigation directly—and often uneasily—involves the FBI and ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Do you have a personal view on the immigration issue or any cynicism regarding the related work of federal agencies?
I think the people who serve in federal law enforcement do the best they can with what they have. I used to work for the United States Forest Service and the Job Corps, and I was always impressed with the quality of men and women who serve our government. I think the immigration difficulties we are experiencing today are directly related to our policies in Latin America, and also the wish on the part of many business interests to see an end to labor unions.

Your treatment of women in Rain Gods might be viewed as extreme. Juxtaposed with the dead Thai drug mules and strippers and escorts are tremendously strong figures like Holland’s devoted deputy Pam Tibbs, the defiantly combative strip-club owner’s wife Esther Dolan and the feisty country singer Vicki Gaddis.
The three women you mention are among the strongest characters in my work. The victims of the sex trade are not dealt with individually because they are not central players in the story. However, my experience has been, as Orwell once said, that people are always much better than we think they are, no matter what roles they occupy.

Deputy Tibbs, though young enough to be Holland’s daughter, has romantic designs on him. The age difference bothers him, yet we’re tantalizingly left hanging about exactly what happens between the two of them. Any hints about what happens between the two of them?
I never know what lies next in the story. I believe the story is written in the unconscious and the artist is its incremental discoverer rather than its creator. At least, that is the way it has always been for me.

Three of your previous books—In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, Two for Texas and Heaven's Prisoners—have been adapted for the screen, and Rain Gods would also seem to be a logical candidate for a film. Have you been satisfied with Hollywood’s treatment of your work?
My experience with the film industry has always been a good one. In each instance, the creative people involved in the project treated the work with respect and did the best job they could. A writer shouldn't ask for more.

You’ve been referred to as “a Faulkner of crime writing.” How do you feel about that designation? And, since you began your career as a writer of “serious” fiction, has your work in the crime genre fulfilled your literary ambitions?
The comparison with William Faulker is very complimentary, but Faulkner's work is on a level with the work of Shakespeare and Chaucer and Homer and Keats. The only change that has taken place in my work is the fact that with the writing of The Neon Rain, some of my novels were narrated by a police officer, namely Dave Robicheaux. The themes, the settings, the type of people I write about are the same as the ones we encounter in my first novel, Half of Paradise.

Rain Gods is chock-full of details on myriad topics—the Korean War, the drug trade, seedy night clubs, firearms, federal law enforcement, all manner of Texas geography and flora and fauna, etc. How much research do you do, or is it all second nature by now?
I do little if any research. Most of the people I write about are composites of people I have known. Hemingway once said that once the author knows his characters, he can place them in any setting or era he wishes.

Holland’s antagonists in Rain Gods are a motley bunch of lowlifes, all fit for a Tarantino film. Have you known many people like this in the course of your life?
I was a social worker in California and handled the cases of many parolees and mental patients, some of whom were among the most interesting people I have ever known. I also made recordings of the inmates in the work camps and what was called "the block" at Angola Penitentiary in 1961. I was occasionally a police reporter and worked a bit in the oil patch, and lived in an urban slum and the poorest part of the southern mountains. I may have had few other talents, but I was always a good listener. The great stories are in the air, all around us, everyday, no matter where we're located. All we have to do is listen.

What the heck is creosote?
It's a viscous oil produced by the creosote bush. It's often used to treat wood, particularly railroad ties.

You were born in Houston but have a home in Louisiana, which one would assume is your spiritual literary base given your many Robicheaux novels. Still, you’ve written about Texas in the Holland stories. Which locale do you prefer to bring to life in fiction, and is there another Robicheaux tale on the horizon?
To me, the South and the American West represent the entirety of our experience as a nation, for good or bad. The challenge for the artist is to see the larger story in its smallest component, like coming to know a beach through a grain of sand. I'm writing another novel narrated by Dave Robicheaux now. I hope to write many more stories before I catch the train. In fact, when the latter event occurs, I'm taking my notebook and pen with me.

RELATED CONTENT

Read all our reviews featuring the novels of James Lee Burke.
 

Michael Connelly’s new book, The Scarecrow, hits bookstores this month, having garnered pre-release acclaim from every quarter. It is Connelly’s first novel to feature reporter Jack McEvoy since the runaway bestseller The Poet in 1996. Of all of the characters in Connelly books over the years, McEvoy has the trajectory that most closely resembles Connelly’s own: reporter for a small-town newspaper, a move to the Los Angeles Times, a successful book deal, fame and fortune; analogous events, albeit in a slightly different order.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Connelly via a crackly Tokyo-to-Florida cell phone connection. In addition to having read most of his books over the years, I did some research and learned that Connelly once lived in Raymond Chandler’s old apartment, a factoid I thought worth pursuing.

“Ah, you must have visited Wikipedia,” Connelly begins, with a knowing chuckle. “As so often happens with the Internet, they got the germ of the story right, but they missed out on the details.” Connelly says he was inspired to start writing mysteries after seeing Robert Altman’s film The Long Goodbye, in which Elliott Gould stars as the Chandler detective Philip Marlowe. “When I moved to L.A., I thought it would be cool to live in the apartment where Marlowe/Gould had lived in the movie,” he says. The apartment wasn’t available at the time, but years later it became vacant and Connelly moved in. “On the plus side, it had a great view overlooking L.A., and I could walk to the Hollywood Bowl to see the Rolling Stones. On, the minus side, it wasn’t air-conditioned, and it always smelled a bit like a gas leak,” Connelly recalls.

Connelly’s character, Jack McEvoy, lives in a Craftsman home south of Sunset, and does his writing from the pressroom of the Los Angeles Times. This is a room with which Connelly is intimately familiar from his years as a crime reporter, and one of his aims in writing The Scarecrow was to focus on the sad decline of newspapers like the Times. The real-life closing in February of the Rocky Mountain News, the site of McEvoy’s previous posting, forced the recall of The Scarecrow manuscript so Connelly could make last-minute changes to the book. As more newspapers around the country shut down, Connelly says, “I think what is lost is a community center, a place of news and ideas and debate. It will be splintered among websites and blogs. Perhaps more important is the loss of a watchdog. Who will keep an eye on the small stuff? Who will uncover the small corruptions that lead to the big ones? Will the bloggers do it? Will websites do it? I’m not sure.”

As The Scarecrow opens, McEvoy’s career is in flux: thanks to the double whammy of his large paycheck and the L.A. Times’ plummeting fortunes, he is about to be given the heave-ho. Asked to stay on for a brief period to train his replacement, Mc-Evoy faces a conundrum: on the one hand, he would love to leave his boss twisting in the wind, but he is working on an article that might well garner him the Pulitzer Prize, and he’d really like to stick around long enough to see it in print. His story focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old journeyman felon charged with rape and murder. It takes McEvoy next to no time to deduce that Winslow’s so-called confession is bogus, which begs the bigger question: if this fledgling thug isn’t the killer, then who is the Scarecrow? And how can one write about this stuff without giving real-life villains usable ideas?

“I think you always have to have some responsibility when you write up the bad guys,” Connelly says. “For example, I never give every step in a crime because I don’t want the books to be a primer for anybody. Most of the time, unfortunately, I am not plowing new ground. The bad guy in The Scarecrow may be unique, but the use of the Internet for nefarious deeds is nothing new. This so-called Craigslist Killer would be a case in point. The real thing is always much worse in reality than anything I put into fiction.”

A longtime cinema fan, Connelly has had only one of his books made into a movie thus far, the 2002 Clint Eastwood adaptation of Blood Work. It makes one wonder how Hollywood can pass over such intelligent and action-packed novels in favor of, say, a remake of Bewitched. “Hey, I liked Bewitched,” Connelly says with a laugh. “Seriously, though, I don’t think my books lend themselves to being made into movies, because so much of what happens in the book is in the head of the protagonist. You could do it with voice-overs, but Hollywood doesn’t like voice-overs.”

Asked if he has ever considered doing a Hitchcockian cameo role in a film of his work, Connelly says, “I visited the set of Blood Work a couple of times, but Clint Eastwood never offered me a role as an extra, and I never really thought much about it. Then Eastwood directed Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, and toward the end of the movie, Dennis was in a great cameo in the parade scene, alongside the mayor, no less! Dennis is a friend of mine, and I have given him a good deal of grief about that.”

Speaking of cameo appearances, the McEvoy character has made several, in books featuring longtime Connelly stalwarts Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller. “The idea was that all my books would be part of one big mosaic of time and place. So I consciously look for places to cross-pollinate,” Connelly says. “I needed to have a reporter in The Brass Verdict so I made him Jack McEvoy because I knew I would be writing about him next and it sort of set the table for the next book. I wish there was a device for tracking all of this. I could use one.”

Connelly is not one to rest on his laurels. Indeed, it seems he is not one to rest at all; his next book, 9 Dragons, featuring L.A. cop Harry Bosch, is due out in the fall.
 

Tony Hillerman wrote of C.J. Box's first novel: "Buy two copies of Open Season, and save one in mint condition to sell to first-edition collectors." In his well-crafted debut, Box decisively set himself apart from the crowd of freshman mystery writers. Deftly sidestepping the dreaded sophomore slump, he is back with a vengeance in Savage Run, the second book featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett.

Box, a Wyoming native who has worked as a ranch hand, a surveyor and a fishing guide, focuses his latest book on the battle between conservationists and ranchers for control of the West's open range. The scales tip one way, then the other, in this ongoing struggle, with neither side seeming to gain lasting advantage. In Savage Run the stakes have been raised, as an organization of zealous environmentalists locks horns with the Stockman's Trust, a well-heeled clandestine association of ranchers who will stop at nothing in pursuit of their objectives. When several "tree huggers" meet with foul play in rapid succession, the investigation falls to Joe Pickett. It will prove to be the toughest assignment of his career.

"People seem to see environmental issues as black and white," says Box ("Chuck" to his friends) via telephone from his Wyoming office. "I hoped to present a fair look at both sides of the issue." The environment is certainly a running theme in both Open Season and Savage Run, but more compelling are the characters on either side of the fence: the ranchers who depend upon the use of government lands for grazing their cattle; the newcomers from out of state who hanker after a taste of the Old West; the environmentalists bent on conserving the dwindling natural resources of the region; and finally, the game wardens, who stir the simmering pot in an attempt to keep it from boiling over.

So, are the protagonist and the supporting characters drawn from people in Box's daily life? "Well, there are any number of game wardens who are absolutely sure that Joe Pickett is based on them, and their wives think so as well!" Box says, laughing. "But the truth is that he is a composite of several different people. A game warden has a unique and autonomous job, and that lifestyle attracts a certain type of individual, someone like Joe Pickett."

On a more personal note, Box reveals that his 15-year-old twin daughters are convinced that they are the models for Pickett's older daughter, Sheridan: "I guess there's more than a little resemblance between my youngest daughter and Lucy Pickett, as well," he says with a chuckle. "The girls take a bit of ribbing from their friends at school, because all their friends read the books to see if there is anything potentially embarrassing."

How does it feel to be an overnight success? "It's weird. Open Season sat on my shelf for three and a half years before anyone showed any interest in it. I went to a conference hosted by the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Association, and they had agents on hand to critique new writers' work. The deal was, you could sign up to meet with two agents, so I signed up with two as C.J. Box, two more as Chuck Box. I think I signed up for eight in all. That was in November of 1999, and by the following May I had a publishing deal." Now, two years down the road, Open Season has been optioned for a movie, and Savage Run has received rave advance reviews. "Originally, I was signed to do three books in the Joe Pickett series; we have just signed for an additional three, plus another book that is not part of the series."

Things are nothing if not hectic for Box these days. He has not given up his day job (organizing tours of the western U.S. for European travelers), but writing demands more and more of his time: "I try to devote two entire days a week to writing. The rest of the time, I go in to the office and work just like before." And has he at done something wonderful to celebrate his new success-a round-the-world cruise, a Mercedes? "No time," he says ruefully. "I did take my wife out to dinner, though. Does that count?"

Tops on his wish list: "I hope that someday I have the opportunity to meet Tony Hillerman and thank him personally for his great review!"

For almost 20 years Stephen L. Carter has been carrying a powerful character around in his imagination.

"He was a cold, distant person of enormously strong political views," Carter says during a call to his office at Yale University Law School, "the patriarch of his family, pretty conservative in the sense that a lot of old, traditional black families are conservative. A judge."

While he struggled and experimented with ways to free this character to tell his story, while bits and pieces of novels accumulated in a trunk in his basement, Carter pursued his career as a professor of law and a public intellectual. He wrote such widely praised nonfiction books as The Culture of Disbelief and Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. He appeared frequently as an expert commentator on Nightline and Face the Nation. He wrote often in the popular press and legal journals. He was named William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale.

Finally, about five years ago, Carter, who has known since childhood that he wanted to write novels, discovered the fictional vehicle that would allow the judge—and all the other characters associated with this powerful, controversial personality—to come alive. Well, almost alive. Because one of the intriguing things about The Emperor of Ocean Park is that the dominant personality of the novel—Judge Oliver Garland—dies at home in his study in Washington, D.C., at the beginning of the story.

When Carter finally completed his first novel, its mix of character and action so thrilled those in the publishing world that they clamored to buy the whopping doorstop of a book. Knopf outbid 11 other publishers with a $4 million, two-book deal, and movie makers fell in line soon thereafter, offering a hefty sum for the film rights. The competition garnered newspaper headlines and predictions that the book would be one of the biggest hits of the summer. Adding to the hoopla is Knopf’s decision to launch The Emperor of Ocean Park with a staggering 500,000 first printing.

It’s a hefty gamble on a first-time fiction author, but the publisher is confident readers will flock to this complex literary thriller. Carter deftly weaves together several strands, from the relationships of fathers and sons and husbands and wives to the politics of the Nixon and Reagan eras.

At the center of it all is the recently deceased Judge Garland, who had been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, then forced to withdraw because of his association with a shadowy figure named Jack Ziegler.

Embittered by his treatment by liberals in the Senate, Judge Garland became a darling of the Republican Right and grew increasingly distant from his three surviving children. One of the three, Mariah, does not believe the judge has died of natural causes. She inveigles her brother Talcott, a law professor at a fictional Ivy League law school in an equally fictional town called Elm Harbor, Connecticut, to join her in an investigation of her father’s death. Talcott—Misha to his friends—is the narrator of The Emperor of Ocean Park.

And Talcott has problems of his own. He struggles to hold together his marriage with his disloyal wife, Kimmer, an ambitious attorney on the president’s short-list for the federal bench. As he tries to unravel the clues his father left him in the form of chess problems, he grows increasingly alienated from his colleagues at the law school. His relationship with his young son worsens. He is pursued by a maddening array of people who demand to know about his father’s "arrangements." And, finally, he must contend with the awesome task of discovering who his father really was.

One of the most interesting threads of the book is Carter’s portrayal of the black upper class and black professionals.

"I didn’t grow up around that kind of wealth in the black community, but many people do," Carter says. "Many of these professional families, with their big houses, imported cars and vacation homes, have had money for generations. That is something we don’t hear about very much, and I wanted to talk about that experience a little bit. Another thing I wanted to talk about are some of the day-to-day perceptions of black professionals who work in predominately white places."

Carter says that much of the novel is about perceptions. And he cautions, "It’s not a book of opinion. These things emerged as I began to let my characters tell their stories. In fact, there are things in the book that I don’t agree with. The point was not to persuade the reader but to provoke the reader, to put in these asides, these subtleties, these themes that people don’t think about so much. The different ways in which people very often see the same event is important. What fascinates me in relationships between people is how so much of life is misunderstanding."

Asked about the surface similarities between his character Talcott, a professor of law at an Ivy League school, and himself, Carter is quick to remind his reader that this is a work of fiction, of imagination.

"Talcott is a deeply obsessive person who is constantly interrogating the world," Carter says. "I have a much more laid-back view of the world. And I think I have a greater acceptance of human frailty than Talcott does. It’s very important for me to portray people in ways that they are not a captive of their weaknesses. What is of real interest to me about life— and therefore was of interest to me in writing this novel—is the notion that people succeed not because they undergo fundamental changes of character, but because they transcend their weaknesses."

Continuing in that vein, Carter says, "I’m interested in constancy. I’m interested in how people stay the same. Indeed, I’m interested in the virtue of staying the same sometimes when the world is changing around you. That’s why so much of the book is about love and loyalty," he says. "Talcott’s attitude about love in the book is an old notion in Christianity and Judaism and a lot of traditional societies. It’s the idea that love is an activity, an act of will, rather than a feeling or desire. Talcott and other characters . . . cling to decisions to be loyal or loving, as opposed to simply being moved by what they happen to be feeling. Love is something you decide to do."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, Caifornia.

Some say that the practice of law is the art of compromise. Crafting a successful legal thriller involves a similar process of discovery, rebuttal and the occasional 11th-hour revelation for Mary and Pamela O'Shaughnessy. Eight years ago, the two sisters invented fictitious Lake Tahoe attorney Nina Reilly, who summarily argued her way onto the bestseller lists. They chose the pen name Perri by combining their first names, with a nod to a certain fictional barrister.

"We were inspired by the Perry Mason series to have a lawyer who continued through a lot of different cases," Mary says. "But he never changed; he was suave, urbane, he had his little martinis and his calm relationships that were just suggested and never really fulfilled. Nina's not like that; she's much more a character in transition." Indeed. Between running her business, juggling her love life with Carmel private investigator Paul van Wagoner, keeping her teenage son Bob out of trouble with his cyber-punk girlfriend Nikki and maintaining ties to her ex-husband, San Francisco attorney Jack McIntyre, Nina is one lawyer who has little time for happy hour.

In the new thriller Unfit to Practice, Nina's career takes a dramatic turn when her truck is stolen with three sensitive case files inside. Slowly and with sinister intent, someone begins to leak information from the confidential files to sabotage Nina's cases. When her own clients complain to the California State Bar, Nina faces disbarment and turns to the best defense lawyer she knows, ex-husband Jack. The O'Shaughnessys grew up imagining gripping crime scenarios together as kids in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Pam went on to earn a law degree from Harvard and worked for 16 years as a trial lawyer in private practice in the very Lake Tahoe Starlake Building where Counselor Reilly now resides. Mary took her English degree east to Boston, where she worked on multimedia projects in New York, Washington, D.C., and the Virgin Islands.

Somewhere in mid-career, each reached a personal crossroads. For Pam, raising a toddler sparked dreams of a more creative life. For Mary, the prospect of returning to work with three children under the age of five seemed unimaginable.

Both had been writing independently, pecking away late at night after the kids were in bed. Mary had a book with no plot, Pam a plot with no ending. Why not try collaborating and see what might happen? The idea was terrific, but the collaborative process proved a bit more challenging than it had in childhood, particularly since the two now live in different states. Pam has homes in Hawaii and Lake Tahoe, while Mary lives south of San Francisco. Eight books into their long-distance partnership, they're still working out the kinks of their admittedly idiosyncratic method of writing together.

As a rule, the one who comes up with the premise takes the lead role for that book; the two tend to alternate. The arrangement serves to break creative deadlocks.

"It doesn't mean that we don't each put in equal amounts of work on the draft, we do," says Mary. "But one person has the ultimate say. What that means is they get to do the final draft, so at a certain point you just have to let go, there's no point in arguing." The title comes early on in the story's development, and yes, as a matter of fact, it's getting harder and harder to find suitable three-word legal terms. (Previous titles in the series include Writ of Execution, Invasion of Privacy and Obstruction of Justice.) "We try to choose a legal term that says something about the plot," says Pam. "We seem to be locked into three words, and we're trying to convey some movement, some force of action. It's really difficult." "We look them up to make sure they haven't been used, at least in the last five minutes!" Mary adds.

Next, the sisters draft and submit a detailed outline to their publishers. No problem there? "Just that we throw it out after about the first eight chapters!" quips Pam. In their 1995 debut, Motion to Suppress, they even changed the killer in the fourth draft.

Each writer enjoys the surprises she has come to expect from the other.

"Actually, we're usually very amused," says Mary. "We both love seeing the characters brought to life again. Certainly, the first time you read what the other person has written it's a thrill. Then you begin to look at the nitty gritty and see all of the horrible things they've done, all the mistakes they've made. I think that's just part of the process, to build it up and then tear it down again." The two take turns with the actual writing; generally they will draft eight chapters then pass it to the other to draft the next eight and so on. Pam is the procrastinator, Mary the voice on the phone barking for pages.

"We are real perfectionists and we do have different styles so the book has to go back and forth quite a bit before we're both satisfied," says Mary.

In subsequent drafts (they generally do three complete rewrites before submitting the manuscript to their publisher), the two have learned to correct for each other's blind spots: Pam tends to slip into a passive voice, while Mary's more intricate style and fondness for compound sentences sometimes gets her "buried in language." The O'Shaughnessys say their decision to stay away from graphic sex and violence has been key to the success of the series. "We have some strict standards because we are mothers," says Pam. "We see the books as entertainment, something fun for people, excitement, vicarious adventure. It's important for us to keep the books fun." To keep the writing fun, they've allowed their central character wide berth.

"We're not sure even to this day who that character is in many ways," Mary admits. "She's a little mysterious; she's very impulsive and does things that we did not put in the proposal at any point. She's always changing and always growing, kind of like a real person to us. I'm not sure we always know what she's going to do, and that's always a lot of fun."

Jay Lee MacDonald is a freelance writer in Naples, Florida.

Jessica Speart grew up dreaming of Broadway, preparing for the day she would portray fascinating women with all the nuance and grace of Meryl Streep.

A fiery redhead from New Jersey, Speart trained at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute, which helped her to land parts in off-Broadway productions, television commercials and eventually the ABC soap opera One Life to Live, where she played the recurring role of Angela Foster.

But when success finally arrived, Speart was no longer content to play a role in someone else’s adventure; she wanted the one life she lived to be her own.

“I had studied acting since I was 13 years old and I was as focused and obsessed with that as I now am with this,” she says by phone from San Francisco, where she is researching her eighth wildlife mystery. “I loved it, but I just reached a point where I realized I wasn’t going to be Meryl Streep. It just wasn’t in the stars.” But what was? She didn’t have a clue.

Then life intervened.

“My epiphany came when I was killed off the soap opera by this one-armed scientist, and I thought, this is great, what do I do now? I had all these really crappy part-time jobs, I had broken up with my boyfriend, and I thought, something has to change. So I took all the money I had saved working catering jobs and I went to Africa I blew it on Africa.” Her travels to Kenya and Tanzania ushered in a decade spent writing magazine articles about the plight of wildlife endangered by poachers, smugglers and corporate polluters. Speart was outraged to learn that wildlife crime, including the traditional Chinese medicine black market in everything from rhino horns to bear gall bladders, is a $12-$15 billion a year industry, second only to illegal drug and arms smuggling.

Through field research, she met and earned the trust of special agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She found them as fascinating and imperiled as the endangered species they try to protect.

“It’s a very closed, tight little network. They are basically battered by their own agency; there are very few of them, they don’t get a lot of money or moral support, they’re fighting their own administration, the bureaucracy, all the powers that be, the politicians. I have always been for the underdog and I really started to tell a lot of stories about what they were up against and the agents started to open up to me.” Her desire to alert a broader readership to the plight of endangered wildlife prompted her to turn to fiction. Her 1997 debut, Gator Aide, launched her wildlife mystery series featuring Rachel Porter, a spunky Fish and Wildlife special agent who is equally at odds with both the bad guys and her own pencil-pushing superiors.

Coastal Disturbance, the latest entry in the series, finds Agent Porter up to her neck in trouble amid the swamps of southern Georgia, where she uncovers an illegal manatee water park. When the docile manatees start dying, she traces the source to toxic discharge from a powerful corporate polluter with sinister friends in high places including Porter’s own agency.

“One of the reasons mystery writers become mystery writers is because they want to see justice done,” Speart says. “You’re really frustrated with the system.” In the course of her research for the series, Speart has had a few brushes with Indiana Jones-style adventure: She’s done tequila shots with a tattooed stripper, visited a drug smuggler’s viper collection and entered a cage alone with two mountain lions.

These days, when this former actress dons a role, she’s doing it for herself and her readers.

“Things that you would never do in real life, you do when you’re researching. Rachel becomes a role; I become Rachel,” she admits. “You trade one unstable future for another, but writing has definitely been better for me.” Jay Lee MacDonald is a professional writer based in Naples, Florida.

The best fictional detectives are mysteries unto themselves: hard-bitten, world-weary, troubled souls who keep the dark, uncomfortable corners of their past clearly marked off-limits by yellow police tape.

So it comes as a surprise when the moodiest of the lot, L.A. Homicide Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch, suddenly opens up as never before in Lost Light, case number nine in Michael Connelly’s streetwise nocturne on the seamy side of Hollywood.

Here, Bosch narrates his own story for the first time. Connelly’s only previous foray into first-person narrative appeared in The Poet (1996), a non-Bosch novel and longstanding favorite with fans.

"It was actually pretty hard at first—more than at first, for a good long period," Connelly admits. "I had written eight novels that had Bosch in them, all in third person, so you kind of get into a routine of how to project to the reader what he’s thinking and what he’s working on.

"When you go into first person, all bets are off. You find yourself feeling like you’re cheating the reader if you hold anything back. I think that’s one of the things that was good about the old Harry; I was able to hold things back and kind of spring them on the reader when I wanted to."

In Lost Light, we pick up the ever-brooding Bosch nine months after he has turned in his badge (at the end of last year’s bestseller, City of Bones). He has kicked his two-pack-a-day habit, bought a used Mercedes SUV and signed on for sax lessons to fill the void left by the job. Too restless to retire, he decides to poke into an unsolved murder case. The trail soon lands him at the center of yet another hornet’s nest of lies and cover-ups, this one involving not only the FBI but the new Homeland Security Department, as well.

Lost Light is Connelly’s shortest and lightest Bosch. Not coincidentally, it is also his first since moving his wife and young daughter from Los Angeles to Tampa two years ago. It was a homecoming for Connelly, who grew up in Fort Lauderdale and worked as a teen at Bahia Mar, the marina where John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee moored his beloved houseboat, the Busted Flush.

Connelly admits the change of scenery worked wonders.

"I have found that moving away has changed my way of looking at L.A., and that has kind of re-invigorated me," he says.

So it was naturally time to shake things up a bit for Bosch as well.

"As a writer, you’ve got to keep moving or you get stale. Even the best series seem to have their down moments or stale moments. I’m just searching for ways to avoid that. I don’t know if this book does that, but it helped re-energize me to take Harry in a new direction, both in his fictional life and in my writing life, by working in first person with him. All of that added up to make this one of the better writing periods I have had, and as a believer that what happens in the writing process happens in the reading process, I hope that this new direction will be a successful one—for him and me."

A lot has happened in our world since we last saw Bosch. It was perhaps inevitable that 9/11 and its repercussions would figure into Lost Light.

"It goes along with my continuing belief that contemporary crime novels are much more immediate in terms of their reflection of society than any other form of fiction. That’s one of the reasons that I’m drawn to them and like them," says Connelly. "Like everyone, I think the world has changed since Sept. 11th. It’s changed for the better in some ways and for the worse in others, and it’s a worthy thing to look at in fiction."

In Lost Light, Bosch confronts REACT (for Rapid Response Enforcement and Counter Terrorism), a "by-any-means" special unit of the FBI whose unchecked powers are frightening even to its own agents.

Connelly admits he’s as perplexed as the next guy by the new landscape of post-9/11 law enforcement.

"It’s kind of changed the way we do business," he says. "Hopefully I have drawn forth both sides, and have Harry Bosch stuck in the middle. That’s how I feel, too: stuck in the middle. On some days I think, what are we doing? Why have we gone so extreme in changing the rules? Then on other days I think, we’ve got to get out there and do more. I’ve got a six-year-old daughter, and on those days I’m all for throwing every rule to the wind and doing what we have to do. I have the same kind of dilemma everybody has."

Lost Light ends on an unusually happy note for this generally somber series. Appropriately, Connelly chose to mark the occasion by pressing at his own expense a CD of cool jazz classics entitled "Dark Sacred Night: The Music of Harry Bosch," to give to devoted fans at book signings. It’s the music that Connelly listens to when he crafts his Bosch novels and the ones Harry often slides into the CD player.

"Music is pretty important in the book," Connelly says. "This isn’t the music of my choice in my life; I probably know more about rock and roll and blues than I do about jazz. But it seems appropriate for him. He’s a loner and this kind of music plays into that."

Connelly plans to let Harry tell it again for one more outing as a PI. After that, he’s thinking of luring him out of retirement to work with the L.A. District Attorney’s office on a special project tracking down unsolved "cold cases."

But rest assured that, unlike his creator, Bosch will remain firmly entrenched in the City of Angels, though an occasional side trip isn’t out of the question.

"For one thing, I’m still fascinated with L.A. to a higher degree than I’m fascinated by my new surroundings in Florida," he says. "On a commercial level, it could possibly be detrimental to my career to start writing about South Tampa or Fort Lauderdale. My books have often had the characters go elsewhere. And if Harry does go down the road of cold cases, they can lead anywhere."

Jay Lee MacDonald is a writer based in Florida.

In art as in nature, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Case in point: Alafair Burke. The daughter of acclaimed crime writer James Lee Burke was reading aloud from Cool Hand Luke at age 5 and crafting complete mystery stories with cool Burke titles such as The Case of the Cat Who Lost Its Meow long before her classmates had even mastered their ABCs.

Forget nature vs. nurture—Alafair Burke had both growing up at the foot of one of the hardest working authors in crime fiction.

“When people asked what he did, I would say he was a college professor and a writer,” Alafair recalls from Buffalo, New York, during a conference call that included her famous father. “He wrote every day in the house; that was what I would see him do. His good habits, I think, rubbed off on the kids.” Rubbed off, indeed. All four Burke children have been successful in their careers. Andree is a psychologist, Pamala a television ad producer, and Alafair, the youngest, followed her brother Jim Jr. into law as a prosecuting attorney.

“Alafair was a straight-A student from first grade all the way through Stanford law,” the proud father chimes in from the family’s summer home in Missoula, Montana. “She was Phi Beta Kappa at Reed College and graduated at the top of her class at Stanford law.” To which Alafair commences blushing in Buffalo.

“The downside of the story is she gets it from her mom!” James howls, bursting into his distinctive full-throated belly laugh.

Pearl, his wife of 43 years, is an irrepressible Beijing-born painter and photographer who once served as a flight attendant with Air America. The two met as creative writing graduate students at the University of Missouri.

The occasion of this father-daughter tele-reunion is the publication of Judgment Calls, Alafair’s debut legal thriller and first in a planned series. Samantha Kincaid, deputy district attorney for Multnomah County in Portland, Oregon, is old enough to know the ropes but young enough to care. When a 13-year-old prostitute is brutally attacked on the outskirts of town, Kincaid decides to press for an attempted murder conviction against the advice of her boss, Tim O’Donnell, who would rather accept an assault plea.

Kincaid’s moral compass quickly leads her into Portland’s darker corners, where an underage prostitution ring, a headline-making death penalty case and a serial killer make her question her own judgment calls.

Alafair admits she modeled Sam after her own experiences as an assistant Multnomah County D.A.; she spent five years there and tried more than 30 cases, most of them involving domestic violence, before accepting a teaching position at Hofstra School of Law.

“She’s a bit of a tougher egg than I am; she’s probably more of what I strive to be than what I am,” Alafair admits. “She has kind of a crazy personality where she does everything to extremes. She’s a little obsessive.” The title is a lovely double entendre, invoking both the art of the law and its very real consequences. Judgment Calls reveals what really happens in the sidebars and behind closed doors in the judge’s chambers, where life-or-death decisions are never black or white.

“That is something that I might be able to bring from my background that is unique compared to other writers. The prosecutor really wields an incredible amount of discretion,” she says. “Cases that have the potential to have really serious ramifications will be lost in the shuffle of a busy D.A.’s office where every attorney is literally handling hundreds of files a month. The vast majority of criminal cases get pled out and nobody really looks at them.” Alafair showed a knack for the well-turned book title early on. At age 6, she giggled out the title The Lost Get-Back Boogie after listening with her father to a recording of Woody Guthrie’s “Lost Train Blues.” “I went upstairs and wrote that on the title page” of the novel he was then writing, Jim recalls. “The book became infamous for setting the record at 111 as the most rejected title and book in the history of New York publishing. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize after it was finally published by LSU Press,” in 1986.

A love of law and language runs deep as willow roots in the Burke family. Jim estimates there are five generations of lawyers in his bloodline going back to his great-grandfather, Robert Perry, a Louisiana judge whose Civil War adventures Burke chronicled in last year’s White Doves at Morning. Burke himself studied pre-law before writing took a firm grip on him.

Given the bayou setting of her father’s Dave Robicheaux series, some may be surprised to find Alafair’s work set in the Pacific Northwest. In fact, Alafair was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where her father was teaching at Miami-Dade Community College, grew up from age 8 in Wichita, Kansas, where he taught at Wichita State University, and has spent most of her adult life on the West Coast.

Paternal bragging rights aside, Professor Jim gives his straight-A daughter the highest marks on her first book.

“I think this is an exceptional book. One, it’s very well written. The prose is extremely professional. The dialogue is good. It’s a tight book. Alafair always wrote good prose, regardless of the medium. Her essays are lovely pieces of writing; her legalistic writing is exceptional as well. She writes with the authority of experience, and there’s no surrogate for that.” Might Samantha Kincaid and Dave Robicheaux one day cross paths? In a strange way, they already have.

In 1988’s Heaven’s Prisoners, Robicheaux adopted a 6-year-old named Alafair, whom he saved from drowning when a plane full of illegal immigrants crashed in the bayou. In Burke’s next Robicheaux adventure, Last Car to Elysian Fields (due in September), Alafair is in Portland working on her first novel.

“I never thought about that, Robicheaux and Kincaid meeting up,” the real Alafair admits. “It’s interesting to think whether those characters would like each other based on first appearances; they’re both quick to sum people up. That would be like worlds colliding.”

A victim turns the tables on her attacker in a powerful new thriller If Jilliane Hoffman’s fiction debut, Retribution, seems sinfully rich in the stuff we crave most in a good legal thriller, it’s because she prepared the book from scratch using only the finest ingredients: one part Thomas Harris, one part James Patterson and one part John Grisham. The result is a psychological nail-biter that moves at lightning speed through a series of jury-jolting courtroom revelations. The former Miami prosecutor had a killer idea for a psychological thriller about a rape victim who ends up prosecuting her assailant. At her husband’s suggestion, Hoffman left her high-profile dream job as the regional legal advisor to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the state equivalent of the FBI, to stay at home in Fort Lauderdale with their two children, ages four and six, and write fiction.

While the book-buying public will deliver its verdict shortly, Retribution has already been found guilty of movie blockbuster potential by Warner Bros., which paid seven figures for the film rights. Five top actresses Jodie Foster, Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger and Gwyneth Paltrow are vying for the lead. Production is expected to begin this summer.

Pardon Hoffman for being a bit thunderstruck at her beginner’s luck. After all, she had never written more than a legal brief before creating Retribution.

“What a week I had! The book was auctioned off on a Monday, it was sold in five countries by Wednesday, and then it was sold to Warner Brothers on Friday. I keep thinking I’m probably going to die a very violent death because I had such a great year. Somebody should not have that much good luck in one year.” Early buzz hints that Retribution could be this year’s Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow’s 1987 debut that cast a similarly jaundiced eye toward our often-fallible justice system.

The novel opens with the brutal rape of Chloe Larson, a New York law student who is about to marry and embark on a promising legal career. Her attacker, who wears a clown’s mask, is never found and continues to stalk her, derailing her life.

Fast-forward a decade. Chloe has reinvented herself as C.J. Townsend, a hard-nosed Miami state attorney and go-to prosecutor in high-profile capital cases whose past remains her closely guarded secret. When police apprehend a serial killer dubbed Cupid by the media (his m.o. involves surgically removing the hearts of his female victims), C.J. can’t wait to prosecute him until she hears his voice in court and, to her horror, finds herself face to face with her long-ago assailant.

Can she ethically proceed with the prosecution? Should she come clean about her relationship to the accused and risk having the case reassigned to a less competent prosecutor? Or, if she keeps her secret, can she hold herself together long enough to win a conviction? It’s a tasty dilemma, the first of several in this well-plotted page-turner that culminates in a surprise ending that will leave readers analyzing C.J.’s choices for days to come.

“That’s exactly what I was after,” Hoffman admits. “I didn’t want to have a happy ending. I wanted it to spur discussion.” Hoffman had a tough jury of one to satisfy: herself. “I wanted to make sure that it was real. I can’t stand reading a legal book and I get to a part and think, this would never happen and that would never happen and medically that couldn’t happen.” C.

J. Townsend bears much in common with her creator. Although Hoffman has never been a victim of rape, she has worked closely with victims of domestic violence and prosecuted serial rapists.

“I’ve had many a rape victim tell me their story, and as a female, if you close your eyes and think about what it might be like, you can envision it,” she says. Hoffman defends her decision to open the novel with the brutally believable rape and its even creepier aftermath. “The rape had to be such a brutal act in order for you to understand her trauma in getting over it and her need for revenge,” she says. “When you can feel the terror that the character has gone through, I think you can really empathize with the decisions she has to make later on.” Retribution also pits two women lawyers C.J. and defense attorney Lourdes Rubio against each other in what has been a male-dominated genre. “I had scenes in my head of a conflict between two females over something that would unite females and yet tear them apart. It sounds strange but it seemed like rape was one of those issues that only women could really experience a certain way, and yet if you put them on opposite ends of the same issue, it would make interesting dynamics.” Could Hoffman ever envision herself crossing the aisle and defending the accused? “I could if they were innocent, but you can’t go forward with a defense based on that premise,” she says. “Maybe I’m jaded by the system, but I couldn’t use my skills to get somebody off, then subsequently find out that they were truly guilty. It just seems to go against everything that I believe in.” With a hefty movie deal in pocket and a sequel already in the works, it seems likely that Hoffman’s future court appearances will be strictly confined to jury duty. Jay MacDonald is a writer based in Mississippi.

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.