Louise Penny’s newest thriller A Trick of the Light is our top Whodunit pick for September. The next adventure of Chief Inspector Gamache brings him back to Quebec to investigate a murder within the art scene.

Our reviewer said, “Penny’s characters are, to a one, rich and multifaceted, her plotting is intricately laced with backstory and her depiction of modern-day Quebec is spot on.” Read the rest of the review in the September 2011 Whodunit column.

Penny shared a little insight into Quebec and Chief Inspector Gamache, plus some valuable writing advice, in an interview with BookPage.

Describe your book in one sentence.
The book is about perceptions and duality, the difference between what we say and what we think, the look on our faces and the thoughts in our heads, how the same piece of art can be considered a masterpiece and a disaster, and how a glimmer of hope could simply be a trick of the light.

What do you consider to be the mark of an excellent murder mystery?
When the characters become people, and you care deeply about them. As a result, the main mystery becomes not who committed the crime, or how it was done, but why.

If you could take any one characteristic of CI Gamache for yourself, what would it be? 
Gamache stands up for what he believes in, he has the courage of his convictions. I have convictions, but I often lack courage, and sit in silence while mean things are said about others. It’s a part of myself I don’t admire and constantly try to change, and a trait I intentionally put into Armand Gamache. He’s the ‘better angel’ of my nature.

Why did you choose to set the CI Gamache novels in Quebec?
I love Quebec. It’s where I choose to live and for me location is a very strong character. Emily Dickinson described novels as frigates, that can take us to other places. I’d love for people to pick up one of my books as though it’s a passage to Quebec. To discover this amazing area, with the French language and cuisine and culture. Where the French and English intermarry and live as neighbours, but are not always at ease with each other. A place of rich history and deep passions. I wanted there to be absolutely no doubt, when people get on the frigate, that the destination is Quebec, and that is it an extraordinary place.

What is the best writing advice you’ve received?
When I was struggling with my second book, wrestling with near paralyzing fear, I went to a therapist. I could see that either writer’s block would settle in, or, perhaps worse, I’d write a book simply to please others. I’d play it safe, and lose my own voice. I could see that happening and it was turning writing into a desperately frightening and disappointing chore. The therapist listened to me then said, ‘The wrong person’s writing the book.’ Now, to be honest, that wasn’t immediately helpful.  Then she explained that my ‘critic’ was writing the book. I needed to thank the ‘critic’ and show her the door. Don’t lock it, because I’ll need her later, for the revisions. But I need my creative self to write the first draft. And if in that first draft I spend a day writing ten pages about a chair leg, then do it and don’t worry. Just move on. All the crap will be taken out by the ‘critic’ in the subsequent drafts.

This was hugely freeing because implied in that advice was that I’d never get it right in the first time – and that isn’t what the initial pass is for. It’s to explore, to take chances, to get out of my comfort and do something really scary or stupid. To give myself permission to just ‘try.’ And know there’s a safety net in the form of second, third, fourth drafts. So now my first drafts can be soft and smelly, but somewhere in there is a gem. And I spend the rest of the drafts shaping and polishing and digging deeper, and, I hope, finding the brilliance.

If you weren’t a writer, how would you earn a living?
Well, I was a journalist for many years, though perhaps not the best one. I’m genuinely interested in hearing people talk about their lives, but I’m not a political animal and I tend to be slightly credulous. Not cynical enough. If writing wasn’t an option and I had it to do over again I’d love to work in a museum. Ideally the British Museum. Or the Natural History museum in London. I spend hours there every time we visit.

What are you reading now?
An Agatha Christie! I love Christie and have been hugely inspired by her. Though I’ve tried to build on what Christie did, and not simply imitate. But I’m deeply grateful for their company throughout my life, especially the difficult and trying times.

Stuart Dill is more at home hobnobbing with country music stars than he is slogging through the lower depths of humanity where conspiracies are hatched and killers roam. But he’s succeeded in overcoming that cultural limitation via his first crime novel, Murder On Music Row.

For the uninitiated, Music Row is Nashville’s equivalent to New York’s Tin Pan Alley. Here songs are written and recorded that will eventually be sung around the world. And here careers soar and plummet with astounding velocity. While outwardly serene, this talent-laden piece of real estate is honeycombed with explosive pockets of ambition, ego and jealousy, all factors that make it an ideal locale for murder (even though they rarely occur there in real life).

There are four distinct layers to Dill’s story. The top one deals with the fortunes of superstar Ripley Graham, a mercurial artist who’s on the verge of delivering what is certain to be a best-selling album for his record label. The label is in the process of being acquired by an international conglomerate and needs the much-anticipated album to clinch the deal. Everything falls apart, however, when a sniper’s bullet fells Graham’s manager, Simon Stills, while Graham is shooting a music video on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. With Stills critically injured, his ambitious young intern, Judd Nix, finds himself drawn into the intrigue just as he’s beginning to learn how the convoluted music business operates.

That brings the reader to the second layer. In the process of telling its story, Murder On Music Row also offers one of the most lucid but least “teachy” explanations of how popular music is created and marketed. No surprise here, since Dill’s been in the music business for 26 years and currently manages such high-profile acts as Billy Ray Cyrus, Jo Dee Messina and Laura Bell Bundy. There’s virtually no aspect of the industry he hasn’t touched.

Then there’s the historical layer in which Dill describes how Nashville became a commercial music center. The fourth and final layer is the one that implicitly invites those who are familiar with Music Row to speculate who the real life figures are that Dill partially bases his fictional characters on. Graham, for example, is more than a little flavored with the folksy flamboyance of Garth Brooks.

So Dill has much to talk about when BookPage comes calling at his office on 16th Avenue South, the storied central thoroughfare of Music Row. His crisp white dress shirt tucked neatly into pressed khakis, the blond, curly-haired Dill leans back in his chair and recalls the long and circuitous route that ultimately brought his book to publication.

“I wrote the first page in the late 90s,” he says. “I think a paragraph stayed in the final draft. I wrote most of the book from 10 o’clock at night to 2 o’clock in the morning. I would go home exhausted and tired and see a little bit of the news and then start playing with this. The original idea was what would it look like to have an intern get thrown into the crosshairs—and literally the crossfire—of the politics of the music business with a manager and an artist. It may have been [John] Grisham who said that the formula [for writing fiction] is not that complicated. You take an ordinary person, put him in an extraordinary situation and see if he can get out. So that formula had been in my head for 10 years. But I wanted it to be relevant. It’s fiction, but at the same I wanted the backdrop to be very realistic. I wanted the settings to be real and part of it to be very current. I think there were 14 revisions [of the manuscript] over time. With the last one, I decided we were going to base it in 2011. So I spent January and February [of 2011] doing that."

The story is sufficiently current to include references to the disastrous Nashville flood of May 2010 and to the October 2010 induction of “The Voice” coach Blake Shelton into the Grand Ole Opry.

“I wanted to pepper the book with some real history,” Dill continues. “At the same time, I really did want to talk about the fact that the music industry has changed more in the last 10 years than it has since the beginning of commercial music. It’s at a crisis, and that’s part of the narrative. It pleases me to no end that someone who knows the business here would enjoy the book. That’s all I really want. I thought I could probably throw a piece of fiction out there that would be entertaining for someone that’s not in the business. The more challenging and more frightening part of it all was whether I could write a book that my peers would read and feel like it was worthy. So many times, we get caught up in the New York or L.A. syndrome of somebody making a movie or a book [about country music], and we know that’s not what it’s really like.”

Dill balances his serious intentions with some wickedly deft humor. In an early chapter, his main character, Judd, pores over a guest list for one of Ripley’s lavish costume parties. Readers with only the slightest awareness of country music will recognize many of the names, from Tim McGraw and Faith Hill to Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman. For industry insiders, though, the fun comes in noticing the names that aren’t there—and perhaps in agonizing over why their own names are missing. Naturally, most of Dill’s real clients are on the exclusive list. Elsewhere, Dill writes hilarious and personality-consistent remarks that supposedly issue from the mouths of comedian Jeff Foxworthy and late-night behemoth Jay Leno. He sought permission from neither man for his imagined routines, but they will find nothing to complain about.

Not all of the action takes place in Nashville. Since the requirements of his job have taken him around the world, Dill leads the reader through the streets and into the suites of such other music centers as New York, Los Angeles and London.

“Those are all real places,” he says. “When I began writing the book, I started out with these places [I’d been to] in mind. Then, as I wrote, I started thinking, ‘Did I get that right?’ The Electric Lighting Station in London, where I have the worldwide headquarters of [fictional] Galaxy Records, was where I took a meeting when I was managing Freddy Fender. It was the first time I was in that building, and I was just charmed by it. I didn’t know where it was then. I just got in a cab and went there. Fast forward to almost 10 years later. I’m with Jo Dee Messina in London, and we’re staying at the Royal Garden Hotel. I’m walking down a street and look to my left and there’s that building—just two blocks away. I had no idea that’s where it was. I was excited to find it. In New York at the Carnegie Hall Tower [where other scenes are set], I went up there when the chairman of EMI [Music] worldwide had an office there.”

That Dill made his protagonist an intern was no accident. “I was an intern in the 1111 Building [on Music Row] 26 years ago,” he says. “That’s where I started. So there’s a little bit of romanticism in there for sure. There’s a sense of naivete [in an intern’s perspective] that helps in the telling of the story.”

Dill’s prominence in the music business didn’t give him any leverage in getting his book published. But it did garner him some invaluable advice. “I took it to a couple of agents,” he says. “I was fortunate in that these were friends of mine. So I was lucky in having relationships where I could get real feedback. It wasn’t just a blind submission that got stuck in a pile. Because they were friends, there was probably some obligation [to read the manuscript]. It wasn’t enough obligation to accept it but enough to tell me the truth.”

In the end, Dill served as his own literary agent, acting on a suggestion from his friend, the writer Frye Gaillard. “Frye is from my hometown of Mobile, Alabama, and teaches at the University of South Alabama. He was probably the first guy who said that this was no longer a training exercise, that it was publishable. He called me back and said, ‘You need to take this to Blair.’” Dill’s contacts at John F. Blair, Publisher asked for one additional rewrite of his book before they agreed to publish it.

In 2000, Alan Jackson and George Strait released a record called “Murder On Music Row” that indicted the country music industry for straying too far from its traditional rural roots. It wasn’t a new charge, but it gained a lot of publicity because of the singers’ stature. By this time, Dill had already begun writing his book. “I had different versions of the title [by then],” he says, “but once the song came out, I thought, ‘That’s got to be the title.’”

Although Murder On Music Row is Dill’s first published piece of fiction, he’s determined it won’t be his last. “I do have another idea that I’ve been outlining for awhile that I’m excited about,” he says. “I haven’t done much on it yet. It’s the same idea of playing off the music industry as the backdrop. I like the idea now of using real song titles [for my book titles], even though they don’t necessarily have anything to do with what the songs are about. My working title on this one is ‘Angel From Montgomery.’”

Nashville journalist Edward Morris is the former country music editor of Billboard and currently a senior writer for the Viacom website CMT.com. His books on country music include Garth Brooks: Platinum Cowboy and At Carter Stanley's Grave: Musings on Country Music & Musicians.

German novelist Zoran Drvenkar’s thriller Sorry just might be the “Mystery of the Year,” according to our October 2011 Whodunit column. After winning the Friedrich-Glauser Prize in 2010, it has now been released in English. The unique premise is “dark, demented, radical and grotesquely humorous.”

In a Q&A with BookPage, Drvenkar shared a few of his favorite books and imparted some words on being a writer.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Four friends open an agency that sells excuses to corporations who don’t know how to handle mistakes. The four friends get kind of surprised when a murderer books them.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Charles Bukowski said that not being able to write because of the circumstances getting in the way of your life is a lousy excuse and that you can write unter any conditions, even when a cat crawls up your back and six kids scream in the background.

What was the proudest moment of your career so far?
The proudest moment is happening every time, when I finish a book. I sit there and I can’t believe it and smile stupidly and proud and with no real understanding how I did it.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
There are more than 400 books I think everyone should read, but I will narrow it down to four: The Half Brother by Lars Saaybe Christensen, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and Terror by Dan Simmons.

What’s your favorite movie based on a book?
Fight Club.

As an author of children’s books, film, plays and novels, what is your favorite type of writing?
I like to jump in between genres. I don’t like to be predictable, and where is the fun in writing if you don’t use everything possible writing can offer you?

Bad habit you have no intention of breaking?
Being myself.

Back in March, BookPage chatted with internationally best-selling author Ian Rankin about The Complaints, our March 2011 Mystery of the Month and the first in a new series starring Edinburgh cop Malcolm Fox, who investigates corrupt police officers.

The Impossible Dead, the second book in Rankin’s riveting new series, is featured in the December 2011 Whodunit column and is “[f]illed with fascinating backstory, compelling characters and some sly social commentary.” Rankin graciously chatted with BookPage once again–this time about cops, villains and his unique writing process.

Describe your book in one sentence.
A murder in the present seems to connect to a mysterious death a quarter of a century back, and Inspector Malcolm Fox is determined to see justice done, whatever the cost.

Would you make a good cop?
I would make a terrible cop. I don’t work well as part of a team, and don’t take well to being told what to do by those in positions senior to mine. (I know this from past experience.) So I would have to be a maverick, and the real-life police have little patience with those.

If you could change places with any of your characters for a day, who would you choose and why?
I’d probably change places with Cafferty. He is the villain in many of the Rebus novels, the mobster who controls Edinburgh. Being inside his head would let me discover precisely why he became the man he did. Plus there’d be that vicarious thrill of being a man who is feared, a man held in awe by his minions.

What book are you embarrassed NOT to have read?
So many. I was having this very discussion last night. I studied U.S. Literature for two years at Edinburgh University, yet have never read Catcher in the Rye. That’s just one example.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
I wrote my first detective novel (Knots and Crosses) while still a student at Edinburgh University. I had plans to become a professor of English, and was hesitant about writing in a populist genre. But the Writer-in-Residence put me right by pointing towards authors such as John Buchan. He knew that thrillers, mysteries and novels of psychological suspense can still be regarded as literature.

What is one bad habit you have no intention of breaking?
I’m not sure it’s a bad habit as such–it might not work for others but it works for me. Here it is: when I commence a book I have very little idea where the story will take me. I almost never know who the villain is, or how my detective will end up solving the mystery. The first draft is an exploration. I’m playing detective, getting to know the characters and how they might connect to each other. But that means one day I may find myself reaching the end of a novel still not knowing whodunit!

What are you working on now?
I am in full ‘mulling’ phase–getting vague ideas for a new book without putting very much on paper. I hope to start writing it in January or February 2012.

Also in BookPage:
Read our 7 questions interview with Rankin for The Complaints, the prequel to The Impossible Dead.

What happens when one of contemporary crime fiction's most celebrated authors takes on one of the most beloved classics of all time? Find out in Death Comes to Pemberley, wherein celebrated writer P.D. James lays a mystery at the Darcys' doorstep. We asked the British author a few questions about her latest project—and whether there might be more adventures in Austen in store.

Was it difficult to write about murder while preserving an Austen-esque narrative tone?
After finishing my last detective novel, The Private Patient, I had at the back of my mind the idea of combining my two lifelong enthusiasms, for writing detective fiction and for the novels of Jane Austen, by writing a sequel to Pride and Prejudice which would examine the success of the Darcy’s marriage and also be a credible mystery.  I am so steeped in the language of Jane Austen that it was not difficult to reproduce her narrative tone, although in my novel this is less apparent in the second part when I am dealing with violent events, which she, of course, never included in her work.

How did working with another author's already established characters differ from creating your own characters?
For me the creation of character is the chief satisfaction of writing a novel, and I have never previously either used or wanted to use the character of another writer.  The main difference with Death Comes to Pemberley is that I was developing my own understanding of Jane Austen’s characters and providing some explanation for events in the original novel which I found perplexing, including the reason why Darcy placed a shy 15-year-old sister, Georgiana, who had lost her mother, in the sole care of a woman like Mrs Younge.

What do you think that crime novels and novels about social mores like Austen’s have in common?
The crime novel should to some extent be a novel about social mores and we often learn more from crime fiction about the age and mores in which it is set then we do from more prestigious literature.  For example, if we really want to know what it was like to work in an office in London between the two world wars, we read Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers, which tells us more than many social histories would.

Have you read any of the other sequels to Jane Austen’s novels or watched any of the film adaptations? If so, do you have a favorite?
I have not ready any sequels to Jane Austen’s novels.  I have watched film and television adaptations of her books and my favourite is the BBC’s serialization of Pride and Prejudice, which I thought was brilliantly done.

Who do you think would make a better husband: Darcy or Bingley?
Darcy for Elizabeth, Bingley for Jane.

Why do you think Austen’s novels have such resonance with readers today? What do you most admire about her work?
Her style, her wit, her humour, her humanity, her ability to create character and to bring to life a small community of generally civilized people in rural England in the early 19th century.

Would you consider writing other Austen sequels? Might death come to Emma's Highbury or Sense and Sensibility's Barton Cottage?
No. Writing Death Comes to Pemberley gave me great pleasure which, it seems, many readers are sharing, but I have no intention of writing a further sequel, either to another of Austen’s books or to any other novel.  

Josh Bazell’s first novel, Beat the Reaper, introduced readers to Pietro Brnwa, a former mob hitman who’s doing his best to turn his life around in a New York hospital—but finds it difficult with his patients trying to kill him.

Casually violent and consistently hilarious, sequel Wild Thing doesn’t make Brnwa’s life any easier. He has been hired as a bodyguard to paleontologist (and sexual demigoddess) Dr. Violet Hurst, and they’re headed into the Boundary Waters to investigate an urban legend on a killing spree. Tied up in their endlessly entertaining backwoods adventure is the promise that humans are all about to die, whether it be from the oil crisis, global warming or meddling billionaires.

And so, Bazell’s just the guy we wanted to talk to . . .

Beat the Reaper gave shape to Pietro Brnwa by providing plenty of backstory and flashbacks, but Wild Thing tends to use the present to foreshadow our sad future. Do you think this story is more about Pietro or a message?

I’m not personally that emotional about the fact that humans are rapidly making the only planet we’ll ever have unfit for humans. Or even that so many people who should or do know better are contributing to the process for short-term profit. Humans are mortal, so why shouldn’t the human race be? But with Pietro I’m always looking for situations in which the corrupt are leading the naïve to slaughter, and climate-change denial clearly is one.

Thanks to your handy footnotes, Beat the Reaper dove into problems with the healthcare system. And thanks to those footnotes and sources, Wild Thing is much more than a literary thriller—it’s a warning, focusing on the steps we are taking to our own demise. Do you plan to continue to use Pietro to delve into major issues?

Like I say, for me it’s more about a character responding to corrupt situations. In Beat the Reaper, I hit Pietro with the mob and the healthcare industry. Here I hit him with con artists and politicians. He’s a fun character to do that kind of thing to, because he thinks he’s completely cynical but in reality he has enough idealism left to find out again and again that the world is even worse than he thought. At least as long as anyone cares, and probably well past that point, I’ll keep doing it to him.

Pietro has enough idealism left to find out again and again that the world is even worse than he thought.

Wild Thing moves away from the medical thriller genre, as here Pietro is more bodyguard than doctor. Do you have plans for Pietro to be a doctor again?

There’s a lot more medicine in the next one. But it’s still very different from both Wild Thing and Beat the Reaper.

Speaking of those footnotes, have they always been a part of your writing style, or is this something that you developed for Pietro’s stories?

I use footnotes with Pietro because I found them in so many mob memoirs, usually as a disingenuous “reformed” voice occasionally interrupting the gloating nostalgia that mobsters always have for the time when anyone respected them. With Pietro the footnotes aren’t meant to be exactly that, but they are meant to provide a later, more reflective viewpoint from which Pietro can comment on the action.

To avoid spoilers, I won’t name the well-known political figure who makes an appearance in Wild Thing (with a sword). Going into the story, readers will probably have a strong view of this person—either extremely positive or extremely negative. Why did you include a character about which people already have a strongly formed opinion?

If that’s the only thing people have strong opinions about that they feel annoyed at Wild Thing for bringing up, I’ll have failed.

Is your intended audience for Wild Thing the same as for Beat the Reaper?

I’m not quite smart enough to figure out what people want to read and replicate it, so I tend to be stuck figuring out what I want to read and replicating that. I do sometimes explain references that I worry will be too obscure for anyone else to understand. But only sometimes. On the plus side, I almost always like people who like my books.

What is it about Minnesota that seems to incite murder in so many books?

Whom the gods would destroy they first give lots of exportable natural resources. Is my guess.

Your sources are extensive and seem to come from every direction—what is your research process?

These days the challenge seems more to be to stop researching, particularly from low-grade sources on Opinionmart, I mean the Internet. For Wild Thing I tried to mostly use physical books. Not only do they usually involve one person trying to present a complete argument and the evidence for it in one place at whatever length is required, but they’re so damn quaint.

Is there one urban legend that you like to believe in?

That doing what you love leads to success.

Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney reads more than his share of creepy books, so when he says a novel is sure to be “one of the most disturbing books of the year,” he means it. Defending Jacob, the third novel from former assistant district attorney William Landay, is our February 2012 Mystery of the Month. This is one book you won’t forget.

BookPage chatted with Landay about writing, his opinion of neckties and much more.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Andy Barber is a contented husband and father, and the top trial lawyer in the DA’s office, until his teenage son Jacob is accused of murder, forcing Andy to decide: How far would I go to defend my child? (That’s a horrible sentence, but then it had to do a lot of work. Forgive me, writing gods!)

What is the best part about being a writer?
There are two. First, the very rare occasions when my kids, who are now 8 and 10, seem to think it’s cool to have a writer for a dad. Second—and this will sound hokey, I know—getting to spend your days creating great books that will long outlive you. (Also, third, no neckties.)

What has been the proudest moment in your career?
The next book, always the next one. I never look back.

Name one book you think everyone should read.?
The Great Gatsby. I know, I know: You read it in high school. But read it again. To me, it’s still the Greatest (so far) American Novel. One of the few novels I read over and over, just for the beauty of the writing.

Of all the characters you’ve ever written, which is your favorite?
Probably Andy Barber. Not because he is a superhero. He isn’t. He is badly flawed, in fact. But because he loves his child unreasonably and is absolutely unshakable in his devotion to him. What child wouldn’t like to think his father would stick by him no matter what?

What is your favorite movie based on a book?
The Godfather, but there is lots of competition.

What are you working on now?
I try never to talk about books in progress. It’s bad luck. But briefly, the new book is the flip side of Defending Jacob: An ordinary family is struck by violence, only this time the story is told from the point of view of the victim’s family. That may sound like a grim premise, but the story is actually very hopeful. It suggests we are all much stronger, much tougher than we know. We are all survivors. We have only to be put to the test—though I hope, of course, that none of us ever will be.

Owen Laukkanen’s debut novel, The Professionals, has a clever concept and a breakneck pace. Four recent grads, unsatisfied with the job market, have started kidnapping businessmen to pay the bills; their ringleader is Arthur Pender. To avoid getting caught, they do their research and ask for low ransoms from executives who can afford it. When they accidentally kidnap a man connected to the Mafia, though, their plans are shattered and they must run for their lives, pursued by the mob and the law in the form of Minnesota state investigator Kirk Stevens and FBI agent Carla Windermere.

The first in a series starring Stevens and Windermere, The Professionals is a page-turner from an exciting new talent—who, turns out, has an interesting (not illegal) work history of his own. BookPage talked to Laukkanen about bad guys, professional crime and what a college grad can do to get a paycheck . . . besides kidnapping.

You were previously a poker journalist, and now you work as a commercial fisherman—in addition to writing your thriller series. What’s the riskiest career option: playing poker, fishing or writing fiction?
Great question! Fishing, writing and card playing are all tough ways to make a living, but with writing, at least, the money tends to dwindle, rather than flat-out disappear. In poker and fishing, there's always the chance that luck will lay a beating on you, and in those instances it's very easy to lose tremendous sums of money very, very quickly.

Fishing, meanwhile, combines those high financial stakes with the very real possibility that you'll injure yourself, or, well, die. It's riskier than poker, but a heck of a lot more fun than hanging out in a casino, and you can take plenty of time off to write.

Who do you personally consider the “bad guys” in your novel—the mafia, the kidnappers, the rich guys who get kidnapped . . . or the FBI?
I wrote The Professionals with Arthur Pender and his gang as my de facto protagonists, and though I knew they would tangle with law enforcement sooner or later, I wanted someone a bit darker and more malevolent to act as the true antagonist. I think D'Antonio (the mafia hitman) is the bad guy. The rich guys whom Pender kidnaps aren't bad, I don't think, though from where Pender's standing they sure seem like the enemy.

Pender’s attached to the idea of being a professional criminal because the professionals don’t get caught.

What career advice would you give a group of recent college graduates who are frustrated with the job market?
Learn a trade. There's this idea that every smart kid in the world needs to go to college to succeed at life, but I really don't see any shame in becoming a plumber or a pipefitter or anything like that. Where I live, at least, there are still plenty of jobs for skilled tradespeople.

For those of us dead set on our arts degrees, though, I think an open mind and a willingness to relocate are pretty important. There are still a lot of fun jobs out there; they might just be in Alaska or Texas and not down the street.

I would not advise anyone to turn to crime, particularly kidnapping!

What is the most interesting thing you learned in your research for this novel?
That's another great question, and I'm not sure there's any one thing that stands out as particularly mind-blowing. I quite enjoyed the research aspect of the book; my Google searches on any given day could range from offshore banking regulations to Miami Beach hotels to the various model variations of a TEC-9 machine pistol. It was eclectic and all of it pretty fascinating.

I was also reading David Simon's incredible nonfiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets as I wrote The Professionals. It chronicles one year in the life of the Baltimore PD homicide division, and as a primer for anyone interested in police work, it's indispensible. I leaned on it pretty heavily when it came time to capture the mindset of my cops in, say, an interrogation scene.

Who are your favorite suspense authors? Why were you attracted to write in this genre?
I'll admit to approaching this book with a pretty dim understanding of the ins and outs of crime fiction as a genre. I knew that I liked writers like James Ellroy, Cormac McCarthy and Nelson DeMille, and especially Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming, but I wouldn't have known how to categorize them, and I wouldn't say I write like them, either.

Really, it was as much movies as it was books that attracted me to the genre. I watched a lot of movies growing up, and I wanted to write something action-packed and fast-moving and stylish, like the films I loved as a teenager.

So action movies and, in all seriousness, gangster rap, led me to write crime.

Nowadays, I read a lot more suspense fiction. I really admire Lee Child's facility with language, and I think Alafair Burke is almost criminally underrated. I also really, really like John McFetridge's stuff; he's a Toronto writer whose books don't really qualify as suspense fiction, but they're great crime sagas nonetheless.

Which of your four main characters—Pender, Sawyer, Mouse or Marie—do you most identify with?
I can see a lot of myself in Pender's character, especially the neurotic side that keeps him up late worrying about what it means to be a professional. Pender's also a dreamer, and he's willing to take risks to turn those dreams into reality. I'm not about to kidnap anybody, but I'm not averse to taking chances to seek out the kind of life I want to lead.

What does it mean to be a “professional” criminal, and why is Pender so attached to this idea?
I think Pender's attached to the idea of being a professional criminal because the professionals don't get caught. In Pender's mind, a professional is patient and fastidious; greed and carelessness end careers in his line of work.

Professional criminals, in Pender's mind, are also able to follow the logical course at all times—emotions and circumstance be damned. He's a human being, though, and it's the struggle between logic and emotion that really starts to test him as the book progresses.

What’s next for Stevens and Windermere?
Plenty, I hope! As I write this, I've just sent my editor a round of revisions for the second Stevens and Windermere novel, which takes place a year after the Pender case, and finds our two heroes having fallen largely out of contact. A bank robbery with an unlikely villain brings them together again, while threatening to plunge the Twin Cities into terror and mayhem. We spend a lot more time with Windermere and kind of peel back her veneer of invincibility; I had a lot of fun revisiting her character and expanding her personality beyond the enigmatic young hotshot we see in The Professionals.

And with book two nearing completion, I'm drafting a third Stevens and Windermere novel that will see them back on the road chasing still more bad guys. With any luck I'll be writing about my two Minnesota cops for years to come.

If you thought Scandinavian thrillers couldn’t get any better, think again. Swedish criminal defense lawyer Jens Lapidus makes his English-language debut with Easy Money, the first in the Stockholm Noir trilogy and our April 2012 Mystery of the Month. Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney calls it “hands-down the best gangster thriller in years.”

Lapidus talked to us about writing, great books and the criminal mind.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Three men pursue money, status and power in a dark and brutal account of the Stockholm underworld, with nary a comforting Swedish cop in sight.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Dennis Lehane told me once that you should write what you yourself would love to read. It is perhaps a cliche in the writers handbook, but the reason it’s a cliche is because it’s true, as Lloyd Cole puts it.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
I don’t think there are such books. However, I could mention Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. When the main character, Raskolnikov, puts his philosophical theory to the ultimate test of murder, one of the most tragic tales of suffering and redemption I ever read is unfolding.

What is the best part about being a writer?
I still work full time as a criminal defense lawyer, which is a pretty rigid job, full of laws and rules to follow. For me, writing is the opposite. I set the rules and can be my own judge. This is a good balance, a bit of Yin and Yang, so to speak.

If you were a character in a crime novel, would you rather play the role of criminal or detective?
You won’t find many detectives in my books, because I am much more fascinated with the criminal mind than the inside of a policeman’s head. Therefore, the answer would probably be that I play the role of the criminal, but a criminal with a heart.

What was the proudest moment of your career so far?
When Easy Money was first published it felt unreal and super cool. Then it was translated into English and James Ellroy, my big source of inspiration, could read it. He loved it, which really made me proud.

What are you working on next?
I usually don’t discuss work in progress. But I can say as much as this: It is a new breed of Scandinavian crime fiction.

Set in Lausanne, Switzerland, Jon Steele's debut novel is a haunting and suspenseful thriller about an American call girl, a British private eye and Marc Rochat, the bell ringer at the city's cathedral. The characters' lives intersect after a series of murders in Lausanne . . . and it turns out the villain may not be of this earth. The novel is the first in a trilogy.

Steele, who is also the author of War Junkie, a memoir about working as a cameraman in combat zones, answered questions about his journalism background and the fun of writing minor characters.

Your autobiography, War Junkie, is about your experiences as a cameraman in war zones. What is more challenging for you: Writing fiction or memoir? What is more rewarding?
Someone asked me, why did you write War Junkie? I said, “It was either that or jump off a bridge.” I wasn’t kidding. WJ was about redemption. Watching people suffer and die in a lens and not doing a damn thing to help is a terrible sin. It was also my job. There was a price. I am not normal. I live with ghosts. I’m just this side of sane and alive.

“Tough to categorize’’ is an expression I hear a lot. I take it as a compliment. I love thinking a reader can open The Watchers and set out on a journey of imagination without a roadmap.

I don’t think about what’s more challenging. I won’t do memoirs again. I confessed once.

But the search for redemption, the thing that drove me to write WJ, drives me still. The Watchers is about ghosts, good angels, bad angels, the innocent and the dead. It’s about me looking at the world, with my “once a Catholic, always a Catholic” eyes.

The only reward is me inventing a world that helps me keep the ghosts in the closet. Evil is real, and it stalks the world in the forms of men. 

How have your experiences observing combat informed your fiction?
You know, you’re the first person to ask me this question, so I never thought about it. And these days I try not to think about things I’ve seen from the backend of a camera. Once in awhile I get asked to talk about it. The last time was for a documentary called Under Fire: Journalist in Combat. I was a wreck for almost a year after. The film was shortlisted for the 2011 Academy Awards. I still haven’t seen it.

But here’s the deal. I did my job and risked my life, time and again, because I believed in the nobility of journalism. I had a camera, I was one of the good guys. How that informs my fiction is as plain as the title. In the Hebrew Bible, angels—the creatures from another place sent to protect the creation—are called Watchers.

Cameraman . . . Watchers. Bingo.

It was easy to take the mind-bending conflict of a cameraman watching innocent people die, for the greater good of getting the truth onscreen and into the world, and injecting it into angels . . . letting innocent people die for the greater good of saving all that’s left of paradise.

Me and the angels were the same. We both wanted to save the world.

The distinction is that I did it because I chose to believe it was the right thing to do. Angels, as extensions of another’s will, do it because they have no choice. Blurring that distinction is the spiritual core of The Watchers.

Your novel is tough to categorize. There are elements of fantasy, thriller, noir. Did you set out to write in any particular genre? What do you personally like to read?
“Tough to categorize’’ is an expression I hear a lot. I take it as a compliment. I love thinking a reader can open The Watchers and set out on a journey of imagination without a roadmap.

Did I start out with a genre in mind? Not really. I knew I’d play to the obvious connection between a man who calls the hour in Lausanne (for real, in the 21^st century) and Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (once upon a time, in a far away land)—meaning I wanted to mine Hugo’s classic for all it was worth. That meant incorporating similar elements of adventure, violence, romance religion, mysticism . . . come to think of it, Hunchback of Notre Dame is hard to categorize. So it’s all Hugo’s fault.

What do I read? I assume that means books I go back to over and over again. Raymond Chandler, Grahame Greene, Jack London, George Orwell, Shakespeare, William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Hans Fallada, Mario Vargas Llosa, Tolstoy, Dickens, P.G. Wodehouse, Jane Austin. I read poetry a lot, old stuff. As you can see, I live in a different time.

Which of your three main characters (Marc Rochat, the bell ringer; Katherine Taylor, the call girl; or Jay Harper, the private eye) was the most fun to write?
Impossible to answer. I don’t know how to answer it without spilling the beans about the story. The three main characters are reflections of my own personality, as much as they are their own beings. I defined limits within which the characters could “live.” They were free to do and say as they wished. There was only one rule: They could not escape their fate. Sometimes, one of three would try to pull the wool over my eyes, and I’d have to herd them back into the plot.  

I remember my wife reading the manuscript. She came to the end and threw it at me, all 547 pages of it. She cried and yelled, “No! You can’t do this! Change it, please!” I knew I had it right, because in truth, my wife knew what was coming . . . but when it happened, it was still a shock.

To be honest, I had the most fun with the minor characters. The oddballs, junkies and ghosts who appeared now and then to guide the three main characters along their journey. There’s one in particular. He’s called Saxophoneman. Marc Rochat crosses his path in the halls of the Lausanne train station. Saxophoneman delivers one of my favorite lines in The Watchers: “Ain’t nothing sadder than an angel in nowtimes, little dude.” I liked him so much I’ve brought him back in the next book of the trilogy.

Your novel is described as “Hunchback of Notre Dame meets The Silence of the Lambs, as told by Justin Cronin.” That’s quite a promise! What kind of reader do you think will enjoy your book?
Like I said, anyone who wants to take a journey without a roadmap.

The Watchers is the first book in a trilogy. What comes next?
Angel City is next, then The Way of Sorrows. It’s taking longer than I thought it would, but that’s what happens when you set out without a roadmap. I already know the last line of the third book. It’s just a matter of getting there. And that’s all I’m going to say about it.

The title of Daniel Friedman’s debut mystery—Don’t Ever Get Old—should probably be read in your best Clint Eastwood impersonation. Possibly with a Lucky Strike clamped between your teeth. It’s our June 2012 Top Pick in Mystery, and Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney calls it “one of the most original and entertaining tales I have read in many a moon.”

We chatted with the man behind this awesome Geezer Noir about his crochety protagonist, the process of growing older and what’s next.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Don’t Ever Get Old is about Baruch “Buck” Schatz, an 87 year-old retired cop and World War II veteran who goes hunting for a fugitive Nazi officer and a lost cache of stolen treasure.

When you’re in your 80s, what do you hope to be doing?
My Bubbi, Goldie Burson, is 86 years old and she’s amazing. She goes to the gym at the Jewish Community Center four days a week. She was already there when I showed up on Wednesday morning, and when I finished my workout, she was still going. She does 20 minutes on the elliptical and 35 on the treadmill. Goldie is inspiring. We should
all hope to be so lucky.

Fifty years ago, it seems like people tended to be on the way down by their mid-60s, and these days retirees routinely run marathons and climb mountains. I hope that, by the time I get there, 80 really will be the new 60, and I’ll be playing golf every day. But consider this: When Goldie works out, she doesn’t improve. Despite all her efforts, she’s slower than she was last year, and next year she won’t be as fast as she is now. Senior citizens today often endure for years or even decades after their bodies and minds begin to deteriorate, and if the future brings with it a longer active late-adulthood, it may also bring with it a longer period of decline.

Being young is about hope and about expectation. Tomorrow you’re going to run faster or lift more weight. Next year you’re going to find true love. Within five years, you’ll have that promotion, and you’ll make more money. But at a certain age, the expectation that things will get better reverses on you. That’s what Buck is facing in Don’t Ever Get Old.

“If Buck has the drop on you, and you’ve got a gun tucked in your waistband, he’s not going to ask you if you feel lucky. Your luck has already run out.”

They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but it isn’t true. Invasive surgeries don’t make you stronger. Hypertension doesn’t make you stronger. Arthritis doesn’t make you stronger. Buck Schatz is a war veteran and a retired police detective. His identity and his idea of virtue is based on being tough and self-reliant. A big part of the story is about how he struggles to cope with becoming increasingly frail and dependent on others. And a lot of older people are having to deal with the same kind of circumstances.

Would you make a good cop?
There’s a great line in the movie Touch of Evil about how the Orson Welles character was “a great detective but a lousy cop.” I think that’s Buck, to some extent, and it’s probably what I’d turn out to be.

Being a policeman means never being safe. There are more guns than people in the United States, so even when a cop is doing something as innocuous as traffic or parking enforcement, there’s always a chance that he’ll find himself dealing with somebody armed and angry. It’s very easy for almost any interaction to escalate into a perilous situation, and something like that has to affect the way people see the world. I think it would make me very angry, and probably very dangerous.

I’ve been reading Elmore Leonard‘s Raylan Givens books lately, and I think it’s real cool how Raylan stands there with his fingers hooked into his belt, waiting for the bad guys to make their move before he draws and shoots them. But I can’t really see myself acting that way in the same circumstances, so I write a different sort of character. Buck Schatz is more interested in getting home in one piece than in maintaining a sense of fair play. He figures that if he gives the bad guys a chance to draw on him, sooner or later, one of them is going to be faster. I don’t think he would ever shoot an unarmed man, but if he’s facing an armed suspect, he’d probably shoot without warning.

Even though Dirty Harry is an obvious influence for me, if Buck has the drop on you, and you’ve got a gun tucked in your waistband, he’s not going to ask you if you feel lucky. Your luck has already run out.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
The best mystery novel I’ve ever read is The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

What is your favorite thing about being a writer?
I always say that having written is much better than writing. But coming up with something really clever or finding a great joke in a situation is pretty rewarding.

How do you conquer writer’s block?
The hardest scenes to write are the ones that come between the stuff that goes in the outline or synopsis. If you’re bad at those, your novel chokes on them. It’s so easy to get stuck for days between a couple of major plot-points, and those transitional scenes always end up needing the most revision.

I find rye whiskey helps, though.

What are you working on next?
I’ve got two projects I’m working on right now.

One is a sequel to Don’t Ever Get Old. The first book has very few flashbacks because I wanted to keep the focus on Buck’s present circumstances. I feel like I’ve explored that theme now, so in the next one, I’m free to look back into the past and see what else we can learn about this character. I’ve also got an interesting new antagonist for him: a master-thief who survived the Holocaust and clashed with Buck in the ’60s returns to make an offer Buck might not be able to refuse.

The other is a historical mystery that I’m very excited about. The hero is Lord Byron, the legendary romantic poet, and I’ve tangled him up in a series of murders in 1807 Cambridge, England. Byron believes, based on very little evidence, that the killings involve his supposedly-dead father, but he’s more of a dilettante than a detective, and he gets in over his head very quickly.

Joy Castro’s debut thriller, Hell or High Water, is set in New Orleans almost three years after Hurricane Katrina’s devastation. In this page-turner, Times-Picayune reporter Nola Céspedes is longing for a story that will launch her career as a serious journalist, but an assignment on missing registered sex offenders is not what she had in mind. When she discovers that the recent outbreak of abductions in the city may be linked to her story, Nola sets out to find the culprit—uncovering much about her own past in the process.

In a Q&A with BookPage, Castro explains her love for New Orleans and the challenges of writing a crime novel.

Hell or High Water is very vividly set in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina. On your website you explain that your husband is from Louisiana, and you’ve been visiting the city for 20 years. Why does post-Katrina New Orleans make a good setting for a crime novel?
Thank you! Katrina hit in August, 2005, and the book is set in April, 2008.

Hell or High Water works particularly well in post-Katrina New Orleans because the novel looks specifically at sex crimes, which have a long aftermath. There’s the initial trauma, and then there’s the long, difficult, uncertain process of coming back, of healing. Just because offenders are caught and convicted—and often they’re not—does not mean the damage is somehow magically healed. Recovering is a process. It takes time, and it’s frustrating and painful to the survivors, who often don’t get the help they need.

You’re probably already anticipating the analogy. The city of New Orleans, which is still wrestling with the aftermath of Katrina’s devastation, experienced a similar story writ large. The storm itself was over by September, but its fallout, both in terms of the emotional trauma and the practical difficulties of rebuilding, has lasted for years.

No matter how committed they are, survivors can become exhausted, frustrated, heartbroken, fed up. That’s the story I wanted to tell: the story of aftermath.

What do you love most about the city?
The people. They’re gritty, resilient, smart, strong and passionate. There’s also a tremendous, joyous insistence on pleasure in New Orleans, as well as a hard-boiled gallows humor, which my protagonist Nola shares.

The city is also very beautiful, and its layered cultural history is dense, conflicted and complicated: Native American, French, Senegalese, Congolese, Spanish, Anglo, Italian, Irish and more. I wanted to honor that beauty and complexity.

Like almost everyone, I also love the spectacular music and food of New Orleans. That was the most delicious part of the research—eating, drinking and going out everywhere that Nola would go.

There’s a tremendous, joyous insistence on pleasure in New Orleans, as well as a hard-boiled gallows humor, which my protagonist Nola shares.

This is your first novel. How was the experience of writing Hell or High Water different from writing the nonfiction or short fiction you’ve published?
I’d never worked from an outline before, but I did so with this novel, because it was very important to make sure all the pieces fit together precisely.

When I wrote my memoir The Truth Book, I already knew the story, since I had lived it; I just had to write it. With short fiction, I generally write toward a line or an image, and discover the story as I go.

But a novel—especially a plot-driven novel like a thriller—is a much more complicated organism, with a lot of moving parts. I had to make the story up from scratch, and I had to test the logic of the narrative. Writing an outline let me do that.

In the novel, Nola, a reporter, researches a story about the registered sex offenders who have gone off the grid since Katrina. How did you come up with this plot? What sort of research did you do?
It’s rooted in fact. During the hurricane evacuation, over 1,300 registered sex offenders went off the grid. By early 2008, when Hell or High Water is set, 800 had still not been relocated. That’s true, and that was provocative to me. I thought, That’s a story. What happened to those people? Where are they now? Are they back in New Orleans? Are they a threat? So I thought it would be interesting to have a reporter investigate the story, to see where it took her and what she learned.

I have so much respect for newspapers and journalism in general and for the Times-Picayune in particular, so I made Nola a Times-Picayune reporter.

In terms of research, I learned a lot about various sexual offenses, including nonviolent, non-threatening ones, and the psychology of different kinds of sexual criminals. I also learned about various methods of rehabilitation: what works, what really doesn’t. I was helped by some great university research librarians. All of the information and statistics in the book are drawn from recently published scholarship.

Finally, I researched the long-term effects of sexual crimes on survivors, such as the increased incidence of depression, suicide attempts, drug and alcohol abuse and destructive relationships even long after the assault takes place.

This is a serious problem that our society faces. Sending a rapist to jail does not solve everything for the person who’s been raped.

The interviews with sex offenders in the novel stay away from cliché and portray these characters as real human beings. To what extent did you base Nola’s interactions on reality?
Thank you. I’m glad you think so.

Well, sex offenders are real human beings, so I started there. Let me first clarify that Nola does distinguish in the novel between mild, nonviolent offenses, like consensual sex between a 19-year-old and a younger teenager who are in a relationship together, and the kinds of serious, violent sex offenses, like rape and molestation, of which we usually think in these discussions.

But even regarding these serious, damaging offenders, I wanted to write compassionately and realistically about people who, because they do things that are so heinous, are often written off as monsters, as being too horrifying to contemplate or simply unworthy of our interest or concern. This isn’t true, of course. Rapists and child molesters are not uncommon, and they often pass for normal. They’re often people who’ve been hurt and damaged themselves, and they’re as varied and complex as any other population, so I wanted to show that.

I’m not particularly sympathetic; they need to be stopped. But while demonizing someone can satisfy our sense of moral outrage, it’s not very illuminating or interesting, and it doesn’t make for very good fiction.

Of course, the terror and trauma caused by sexual assaults are devastating, and many people react to sexual criminals in an extremely negative way. I understand that, and I tried to give that perspective a voice in the novel, too, by letting various characters express those feelings of pure revulsion and fear.

I didn’t interview any sex offenders myself for the purposes of writing this book. However, I had the unfortunate opportunity to observe one closely for two years during my early adolescence. After my parents divorced, my mother married a man who was later convicted and imprisoned for child molesting. I ran away at 14, an experience that The Truth Book details. It was a difficult experience, and I’ve been curious about the topic ever since.

What was the most challenging aspect of writing a crime novel?
Plot. Definitely.

My literary training was in high modernism: Faulkner, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf. That’s what I did my scholarly doctorate in, and that’s what I’ve been teaching at the college level for the last 15 years. So even though I wanted to write a thriller because I’ve always loved mysteries, I was initially drawn toward lyrical language and the interior, subjective world of imagery, memory and psychology rather than to plot and action.

Instead of implementing the law of cause and effect, I wanted my characters to sit around having epiphanies and profound thoughts—not a lot of suspense there! So I had to learn how to plot, to make one thing lead to another. It was a grueling process, and I went through many drafts of my outline and many drafts of the manuscript. I learned a lot.

Hell or High Water is the first in a series. What happens next? Do you have an arc in mind for how the series will play out?
Yes, I think so. Nola’s got her own demons, and in each book, the crimes she investigates affect her personally in some way.

In the next novel in the series, Nearer Home, which is also set in New Orleans (the title comes from a Robert Frost poem), Nola becomes uncomfortably involved in the murder of a journalist—one of her former teachers, in fact. She decides to solve the crime, but there’s a political angle, and things get complicated. She becomes a target herself.

In a long-term sense, Nola yearns to understand herself and her past, and since she’s Cuban American, the locale where the books are set may shift in the future. I’m really interested in politics and the environment, so those issues keep working themselves into the novels, too.

Are there any crime series or authors who inspired you to write in this genre?
Oh, yes. I’ve always loved mysteries and thrillers, beginning as a young child with the Bobbsey Twins series and moving on to Sherlock Holmes and others.

In adulthood, I’ve most loved the work of Dashiell Hammett, Dennis Lehane and Kate Atkinson. Those three knockout writers remain both inspirational and aspirational for me.

I also really enjoy the novels of Patricia Highsmith, Tana French and John Banville writing as Benjamin Black. After writing Hell or High Water, I found Raymond Chandler (where had he been all my life?), so he’s been an influence on Nearer Home. To relax and feel cozy, I like Alexander McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie series, which is set in Edinburgh. His books are so gentle. Comfort crime.

What are you reading now?
John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Though I’d read a couple of le Carré’s novels in high school, I had sort of forgotten about him. However, my husband and I recently stayed in an apartment in Spain that happened to have several of his books on the shelves. I started with A Murder of Quality, which was marvelous, and have been bingeing since then. They’re terrific.