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.

The July 2012 Women of Mystery are getting plenty of attention, but only one gets to be our Top Pick. Linda Castillo’s Gone Missing, the newest installment in her Amish thriller series, earns that honor with its gripping tale of murder and Rumspringa gone wrong. Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney writes, “With its wonderfully conflicted protagonist, and its incisive look into a society most of us know little about, Gone Missing is the unquestioned high point of one of the most compelling series in modern suspense fiction.”

Castillo talks Amish country, great books and great characters in a Q&A with BookPage.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Formerly Amish chief of police Kate Burkholder is asked to consult on a missing person case involving an Amish teenager by state agent John Tomasetti, and they discover links to cold cases that go back years—and soon become a murder investigation.

What is it about Amish Country that inspires such great thrillers?
Ohio’s Amish Country is a peaceful and bucolic place of rolling hills, farms and quaint towns. The Amish make it unique—there’s no place like it in the world. I think the element that makes it such a terrific setting for a thriller is the juxtaposition of the beautiful setting and the introduction of evil into it. That contrast is one of the things that prompted me to set my books among the Amish.

What is one book people might be surprised to know you have read?
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a post-apocalyptic book I couldn’t put it down. Epic.

What’s your favorite thing about being a writer?
It’s hard to name just one thing. I love writing stories, creating characters and the world in which they live. I love cooking up mysteries and having my characters work their way through all the red herrings to solve them—the scarier the better. Most of all, I love sharing all of those things with readers. For a writer, there’s no better feeling than to hear from a reader who loved the book.

If you had to be stranded on a desert island with one fictional character, who would you choose?
That’s a tough one because I’ve read so many books with intriguing characters. I’m thinking this is a toss-up between Lucas Davenport [from John Sandford‘s Prey series] and John Tomasetti. (I have huge crushes on both!) If I had to choose, I’d probably go with Tomasetti because I find him endlessly fascinating, and I know if I had the chance to sit down and talk to him, he’d end up surprising the hell out of me.

If you could take one of Kate Burkholder’s characteristics for yourself, what would it be?
It takes courage to be a police officer. Kate is a lot braver than I could ever be. She’s tackled and solved some tough cases that required a good bit of chutzpah. I think I’d like to have her courage.

What are you working on next?
I have two projects in the works. I’m nearly finished with the fifth book in my Kate Burkholder series. No title yet, but it’s a fascinating story that gives us a glimpse into Kate’s childhood and pits her against a villain like she’s never faced before. I’m also working on a standalone novel that has been calling to me for quite some time.

Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney has reviewed four of Timothy Hallinan’s fantastic thrillers—and each one has earned Mystery of the Month. His latest Poke Rafferty novel, The Fear Artist, earns that title for August 2012 with its tale of murder on the streets of Bangkok. Writes Tierney, “The pacing is intense, the characters are among the best in modern suspense fiction and the atmosphere is steamy and dangerous throughout.”

We talked with Hallinan about tough guys, great books and the seamy Bangkok setting.

Describe your book in one sentence.
It’s a thriller set in Bangkok about what happens when someone innocently draws the attention of the War on Terror and becomes possible “collateral damage,” which is a 21st-century euphemism for “dead.”

If you could take one of Poke Rafferty’s characteristics for yourself, what would it be?
Oh, boy. Poke is braver than I am, more resourceful, funnier, younger, better-looking, with better hair . . . I suppose it would be bravery. Most thriller writers are wusses. I just finished a bookstore tour with a well-known (and very good) writer whose series features not one but two brave guys, and it was a real thrill to learn that he’s just as big a doily as I am. Here we are, launching our characters across these lethal landscapes with death waiting at every misstep, and in real life we both get flustered when we miss a turn.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Finish. A writer is someone who finishes. Whatever it takes, finish. Inspiration exists, as Picasso said, but it has to find you working.

What is one book everyone needs to read?
This is a hard one. I read pretty much everything. At the risk of being pretentious, I’m going to say Anthony Trollope’s six-volume novel The Palliser, which tells one great love story over the course of an entire adult lifetime and sets it against a panorama of life in Victorian England and Ireland. And Trollope could write women, which Dickens (in my opinion) couldn’t.

What is it about Bangkok that inspires such great suspense fiction?
Extremes. Bangkok is, as Maugham said about Monaco, “A sunny place for shady people.” Bangkok is rich and poor, sinful and spiritual, noisy and serene, heartless and cheerful. And it’s growing at the rate of one million people a year as family and community structures in the countryside break down. These people are handmade for exploitation. And yet most Thais manage to maintain a kind of equanimity I can only envy.

How do you conquer writer’s block?
By writing my way through it. I don’t actually get traditional writer’s block. What I get is total book collapse as I write my way into something that seems completely impossible to solve, at which point I toss the book and start something else, only to realize (usually) that I DO know how to solve the problem. This happens to me three or four times on every book. I can always write something—it’s just usually not the thing I’m supposed to be writing.

What are you working on next?
The next Poke Rafferty (the sixth), which is tentatively titled For the Dead. I’m in the great phase, which is to say the first 35 to 40 percent, where I haven’t made any enormous mistakes yet, or if I have, I haven’t recognized them. And a book called King Maybe, which is the fourth book in another series, set in Los Angeles.

Julia Keller loathed the assignment. What editor in his right mind would send her, cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune, to cover the aftermath of a tornado two hours west in Utica that had already been thoroughly chronicled by the paper’s own news staff? Did they need an emergency book review?

But it turns out there was one angle the news crew had overlooked, one that only a small-town West Virginia girl who at age nine once ran her own Encyclopedia Brown-inspired detective agency could have sleuthed out.

“What impressed me immediately was, how do you deal with the randomness of catastrophe? How do you wrap your mind around this?” Keller recalls. “Small towns are where there are many, many overlapping lives constantly rubbing up against each other; you’re constantly bumping up against other people’s joys and sorrows. It wasn’t my spiritual journey, but instead my journey to understand how the human spirit deals with the randomness of fate. As I got deeper into that idea, it propelled me back and back to Utica.”

Keller not only won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for her moving three-part Tribune series about the town’s resurrection, she also came away inspired to create a mystery series set in the fictional West Virginia hamlet of Acker’s Gap that would explore what she calls “Appalachian fatalism.”

The series debut, A Killing in the Hills, kicks off with just such random carnage: A gunman ducks into the town’s coffee shop just long enough to fire three shots, killing three senior regulars. Waitress Carly Elkins, the teenage daughter of county prosecuting attorney Belfa “Bell” Elkins, not only witnesses the shooting but recognizes the killer.

"Are you going to leave or are you going to stay? That is the essential question, the ground beneath your feet."

To varying degrees, the central characters—including aging sheriff Nick Fogelsong, Bell’s BFFs Ruthie and Tom Cox and even Charlie Sowards, aka “Chill,” the ne’er-do-well killer—are all victims of a mountain dysphoria that keeps expectations of life in these hills well in check. Bell, whose own horrific past is revealed as she hunts down the mastermind behind the murders, represents the rare few who escaped Appalachia and returned to help improve its fortunes.

“In S.E. Hinton’s wonderful novel, The Outsiders, she has a great line that those characters are very much about who will go and who will stay,” Keller says. “That’s the question, almost more than who you marry or whether you have a family or what your profession will be: Are you going to leave or are you going to stay? And if you stay, will it be with this ever-growing crust of bitterness, or do you stay for the best of reasons? That is the essential question, the ground beneath your feet.”

Don’t misunderstand: Keller’s upbringing in Huntington, West Virginia, was far from hardscrabble. Her father, a math professor at Marshall University, and her mother, a high school English teacher, imbued their daughter with a love of learning and a gift for storytelling. She went on to work as an intern for syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, earned a doctoral degree in English and was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard.

But what looks great on a resume doesn’t always resonate in the heart.

“There’s a line that a character uses in my next book, which is called Bitter River, that says, ‘The only way out is up,’” Keller says. “That’s a line I’ve heard my whole life and it’s so evocative, certainly in a physical and geographical sense but also in a spiritual sense. You have to overcome barriers even to get somewhere else.”

Keller does a masterful job of leaving spooky little unexplained blanks in each of her characters that prompt the reader to second-guess what they think they know about this slightly inchoate cast. For a central character, Bell remains the most elusive of all, by design.

“As I was writing, it occurred to me that there were these vast gaps where we don’t know a lot about the horrific crucibles she went through. Of course, the town’s name is Acker’s Gap, so you know there is more there,” Keller says.

Like Bell, Keller fled these hills to explore the world, yet finds herself drawn back now that time has sanded off the rougher memories. She recently left the Tribune to accept a teaching position at Ohio University in Athens, just up the road from her hometown in the heart of Appalachia. It’s the perfect vantage point from which to survey the peculiar fatalism of the area.

“A friend of mine who remained in Huntington as an ophthalmologist tells me that the biggest thing she faces in her patients isn’t that they’re lazy or have no willpower, it’s that they will look at her and say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t much matter. My father died in his 40s, my mother died in her 40s, it doesn’t much matter.’ It’s this fatalism, which is very different from cynicism. I thought if I could somehow show that in fiction, it would be a terrific way to address that feeling.”

Jo Nesbø has been called the next Stieg Larsson, and this month, our Whodunit columnist calls his newest thriller, Phantom, “one of the finest suspense novels to come out of Scandinavia to date.” It’s our Top Pick in Mystery, and it’s “easily the most troubling and heartfelt” of the Harry Hole series.

We checked in with Nesbø to talk a bit about reading, Harry Hole and great writing advice.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Harry, back in Oslo from Hong Kong to prove that Rakel’s son Oleg is not a murderer, sets out on a dangerous investigation that takes him deep into the world of the most lethal drug to ever hit Oslo, and into the maze of his own past, where he will find the truth.

If you woke up in Harry Hole’s shoes one morning, what would you do?
I have no idea. Harry is good, and although he may not be my alter ego, I’ve certainly used a lot of my own person in Harry. Let’s say 70%. The best parts. Well, some of the not so good, too. But I must have put some of my analytical abilities in there, I believe.

What is one book readers might be surprised to know you have read?
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I’m glad it was short.

What is the greatest compliment you’ve received for your books?
When young people says it inspired them to write.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Be the psychopath. You have to be able to identify with a character, similar to how an actor works. It might be scary sometimes, but that’s what you have to do. Humans are complex; you’ll be able to find most things within yourself. Just use your imagination.

Some readers might not know that you are also the author of several children’s books in the Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder series. What was your favorite book as a child?
My favorite book as a child was Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. It was funny, had bizarre characters and suspense. And a bona fide murder.

What’s next?
Writing. Always writing.

It seems inevitable that Bob Lee Swagger, thriller writer Stephen Hunter’s retired Marine sniper, would one day find a place in the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Swagger isn’t the rumored second gunman, mind you, favored by conspiracy theorists as a more plausible presidential assassin than Lee Harvey Oswald. Quite the contrary; in his latest outing, The Third Bullet, the nation’s top fictional ballistics expert takes his best shot at solving America’s most baffling murder mystery—the assassination that marks its 50th anniversary this year.

As The Third Bullet kicks off, the widow of a prominent thriller writer very much like Hunter tracks Swagger down to his Idaho home to ask him to investigate the death of her husband, who was killed in a late-night hit-and-run that may have had links to the Kennedy assassination. Swagger heads to Dealey Plaza, connects with the JFK conspiracy underground, tracks the author’s killer to Moscow and eventually encounters a CIA operative named Hugh Meachum who provides a shockingly plausible alternate answer to the age-old question: Who killed JFK?

By Hunter’s own admission, The Third Bullet was a tough slog between a mountain of hard evidence and a valley of public doubt about what actually happened on that long-ago Dallas afternoon. To flesh out his storyline, the author immersed himself in the Warren Commission Report, took inventory of the various conspiracy theories, then set off like Swagger for Dealey Plaza to have a look for himself.

Fictional ballistics expert Bob Lee Swagger takes a shot at an age-old question: Who killed JFK?

“What I tried to do from the very beginning was establish hard data points, things that everyone knew and all investigators agreed had happened,” he says. “Then I tried to plot between and around them.”

As he looked down from the famous sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, then sat on the park bench directly below it facing the 90-degree turn that the Kennedy motorcade negotiated before the fatal shot, Hunter’s own hunter’s instinct interceded. The motorcade had slowed to a near-stop for the turn, offering a fish-in-the-barrel shot that even a mediocre marksman like Oswald could have made, compared to the much longer, extremely difficult shot at a moving target as the motorcade pulled away.

“I was stunned,” he recalls. “I looked up and saw the window was about 75 feet away and I thought to myself, good God, why did he not take the easy shot?”

That epiphany unlocked the central mystery of The Third Bullet: If not Oswald, who?

To find a plausible explanation, Hunter recalled a book written by ballistics expert Howard Donahue that theorized Kennedy had been killed by a rogue Secret Service agent shooting from a trailing car.

“It was a thoroughly absurd book and was immediately condemned to purgatory by sentient people, but he understood the science of what happens when a bullet is fired at a man,” Hunter says. In the case of the Kennedy assassination, the third bullet, unlike the previous two, exploded on impact when it hit and killed the president. How could that happen if all three bullets came from the same rifle?

To answer that question, Hunter introduces us to Meachum, a vainglorious Yale-educated veteran of the CIA’s Plans Division with his own secret plans. As frighteningly cold and calculating as Meachum’s story is, Hunter challenged himself by presenting it as excerpts from the man’s diary, his first foray into first-person narrative.

“I wrote that first and I really enjoyed that but there were all kinds of problems,” he admits. “A lot of the effects I get come from cutting and juxtaposing points of view, and it frightened me to get away from those points of view and be stuck in a single head, and yet I found the voice right away. In the end, my problem was shutting Hugh up, not getting him to talk. I discovered a lot of the plotting around Hugh while writing him.”

Hunter, who lives in Baltimore, wrote for the Baltimore Sun for more than 25 years before moving to the Washington Post, where he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for film criticism. He launched the Bob Lee Swagger series in 1993 with Point of Impact, incorporating an encyclopedic knowledge of guns and ballistics, and has gone on to write 17 thrillers.

Did conducting his own investigation into the Kennedy assassination change his view on what happened that dark day in Dallas?

“I suppose I confirmed my suspicions,” Hunter allows. “My theory of the world is that nothing works the way it’s supposed to work, so if anyone argues for perfection, they’re barking up the wrong tree. I wanted my Kennedy assassination conspiracy to be small and adept, but at the same time, mistakes were made, improvisations were made, the whole thing is thrown together on the fly and everybody happens to have a very good day on that day. To me, that was far more realistic than a theory that involves the CIA, Czechoslovakian intelligence and the Mattel toy company and their headquarters is under a volcano. You just don’t believe that.”

Does he agree with Stephen King, who concludes in his JFK speculative novel 11/22/63 that there’s a 99-percent chance Oswald did it?

“That’s how I felt when I started, but now I feel that figure is more like 95 percent,” Hunter says. “There’s a much larger chance than we know that something like [what] I came up with actually happened.”