Fans of Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad novels have undoubtedly been eager to discover the protagonist of her fifth book, The Secret Place. The wait is over, and this time Detective Stephen Moran takes the spotlight in this clever, fast-paced mystery set at an all-girls Irish boarding school. 

We caught up with French and chatted about her love of crime fiction, why everyone should read To Kill a Mockingbird and more in a 7 questions interview.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Detective Stephen Moran gets his longed-for shot at the Murder squad when 16-year-old Holly Mackey brings him a postcard she’s found on the secrets board at her fancy boarding school: a photograph of a murdered boy, with the caption, “I know who killed him.”

Your Dublin Murder Squad series shifts narrators with each book. Why did you choose this structure?
I love reading the traditional series that follow one detective through all the ups and downs of life—P.D. James’s Dalgliesh books, for example—but I’m not interested in writing them. I’m more interested in writing about huge crossroads—moments when the narrator finds himself in a situation where whatever he decides to do will shape the rest of his life. The thing is, though, people don’t get those life-changing moments on a regular basis. So when I started thinking about a second book, I realized that I had three options: keep dumping my poor narrator into huge life-changing situations every couple of years, which not only is pretty implausible but would probably give him a nervous breakdown by about book four; go with the traditional framework of following him through more minor ups and downs, which, again, didn’t interest me; or switch narrator. So I went with the third option: I used a supporting character from In the Woods as the narrator of my next book, The Likeness, and so on.

This also means that I get to focus on different themes in each book, without losing the intensity of the narrator’s connection to the themes. For example, The Secret Place is about friendship, secrets, identity and how it’s defined—and those matter immensely to Stephen Moran, the narrator. For most of my other narrators, those issues aren’t all-important, so the events of this book wouldn’t have anything like the impact on them that they do on Stephen. Instead, their books spin around the themes that matter most deeply to them.

What did you enjoy most about writing from Detective Moran’s perspective?
Contented characters are mostly boring. Reading about someone who’s totally contented and secure is like watching a guy sprawled on his sofa shooting Playstation baddies and eating Doritos: He’s happy, but it’s not exactly fascinating viewing. Stephen Moran is the opposite of that guy: He’s restless right to the bone—constantly searching for the mythical something that will magically transform him into what he dreams of being. I enjoyed writing someone like that, because his lack of a real sense of himself colors the way he sees everything. When he has to work with Antoinette Conway, he’s wary of her because she’s tough and rough-edged, and he doesn’t want to find himself defined by that, even by association. When the case takes him into an elite boarding school, he loves it for the beauty and elegance that he longs to be part of. When their investigation leads them deeper and deeper into the web of friendships among the girls, he’s captivated—and, ultimately, changed—by the way these friendships define and transform them. I liked writing the ways that Stephen’s search for definition drove him forward.

What do you love most about crime fiction?
I love mysteries. I always have. I think this is one of the fundamental things that make us human—our fascination with mysteries, real or fictional, solved or unsolved—and the whole crime genre has grown from that fascination. The genre isn’t just about mysteries and their solutions: it’s about the complex techniques and systems that we’ve developed in order to solve them, about the dedication and passion we pour into that process, the experts who dedicate their lives to it, the ways we succeed or fail at it, about the profound effects mysteries have on those who get caught up in them from every angle . . . This genre is a paean to the crucial part that mysteries play within our lives, and I love that.

I also love the level of insight that crime fiction can offer. Murder happens in every time and place, but the specifics are shaped by the fundamental preoccupations of that society—its deepest fears, its priorities, its most intense desires, its history, its darknesses. In the great crime novels—Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, say, or Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves—the murder becomes a window into the dark heart of the society where it happens.

How do you conquer writer’s block?
Touch wood, I don’t think I’ve ever had full-on writer’s block—the kind where a writer is paralyzed to the point where he or she can’t get anything down on paper—but I do get days or weeks when nothing works, I don’t get anywhere near enough written and what I do write is either awful or pointless (oh, look, it’s a cheesy dream sequence and four pages of irrelevant waffle about some character’s childhood). I fight it with rewrites, more rewrites, long walks and caffeine. Lots of caffeine.

Name one book that you think everyone should read.
To Kill a Mockingbird. There are other books that I love even more, in spite of their flaws, but I can’t think of any book that’s so close to perfection. To explore issues like classism and racism without ever being sanctimonious or preachy, to show the story through the eyes of a child without ever getting cutesy or patronizing, to weave together all those separate little storylines without ever letting them feel sloppy or disjointed–it’s a rare author who can manage even one of those, and Harper Lee makes them all look effortless. And that’s before I even start on the writing and the characterization and the atmosphere . . . No wonder she never wrote another book. Where do you go from there?

What’s next?
I’m working on my sixth book, and Antoinette Conway is the narrator this time. She and Stephen are partners in the Murder squad now, but she’s still not getting on well with the rest of the squad, to put it mildly. They pull a case that at first seems like a routine domestic murder, but gradually they realize that someone within their own squad is working against them—and they need to find out whether that’s because someone is desperate to get rid of Conway, or whether there’s more going on.

Author photo by Kyran O'Brien

Woe be unto the free-range American reader who casually picks up any of Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries, set in the French-Canadian village of Three Pines, expecting a “Murder, She Wrote”-style cozy. The author erupts at the mere suggestion. 

“To call them cozies is to completely misread!” she protests by phone from her home in Sutton, a French-speaking village in Québec, east of Montreal. “I get very annoyed at anyone who calls them cozies, or even traditional. I think it’s facile for people to think that anything set in a village must, per force, be superficial and simplistic.”

Far, far from either, Penny’s addictive series may be the quintessential anti-cozy, centered as it is on a village that bears more resemblance to Twin Peaks than Cabot Cove and an erudite chief inspector of the Sûreté du Québec whose demons are never far behind him.

Publisher Minotaur Books says more than three million copies of the Inspector Gamache books have been sold worldwide since the series debuted in 2006, with growing sales and buzz for each new release. Penny’s 11th Gamache mystery, The Nature of the Beast, marks her largest first printing ever.

As series devotees know, the brooding, wounded Armand Gamache left the Sûreté and retired to Three Pines after tearing the lid off of internal corruption in 2013’s How the Light Gets In, only to resurface last year, shaken but not deterred, in The Long Way Home. Penny focuses as much on whether Gamache will overcome his demons as on whether his next demon will be his last. 

In The Nature of the Beast, 9-year-old Laurent Lepage goes missing after annoying the townspeople yet again with another of his signature far-fetched stories, this one about a monster and an enormous gun hidden deep in the surrounding woods. When the boy’s body is found, the search for his killer leads authorities to the unthinkable: an enormous rocket launcher, expertly concealed, provenance unknown. 

Who built it? How? And most importantly, why? It’s just the knotty puzzler to lure Gamache and his ever-inquisitive wife, Reine-Marie, out of early retirement.

A similar unfathomable horror—the terrorist attacks of 9/11—proved to be a game-changer for Penny as well. Back in 1996, after jettisoning an 18-year on-air career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and winning a 14-year battle with alcoholism, she’d retreated with her physician husband Michael to the Eastern Townships to try her hand at historical fiction. But five years in, she was getting nowhere.

“I realized I was writing for the wrong reason; I was trying to impress my family, my former colleagues—trying to write the best book ever written. The judgment of others has played a terrible role in my life for much of my life, and I became frozen,” she recalls.

Shortly after 9/11, a desultory glance at her bedside table helped dispel her ennui.

“Like most people, I read catholically; I read just about anything. But among my pile of books were crime novels. I remember sitting on my bed looking at them and thinking, that’s it! I will simply write a book I would want to read,” she says.

Those tenuous, post-traumatic days even inspired where she would set her mysteries.

“I was feeling, like the rest of the world, fairly vulnerable and thinking that the world might be a dangerous place, and I wanted to create a place where there was a sense of belonging and community,” she recalls. “The books aren’t about murder; they’re about life and the choices that we make, and what happens to good people when such a harrowing event comes into their lives. It’s an exploration of human nature, I hope.”

Re-inspired by her new direction, Penny tripped out of the gate by shooting for a perfect first draft.

“The danger, at least for the first couple of books, was that I had to get it right the first time. As a result, it paralyzed me because it didn’t allow for creativity, for flights of fancy, for inspiration,” she says.

That’s when her years of journalism with the CBC crashed the party, lending offbeat spontaneity and quirky humor to the otherwise serious task at hand.

“My first drafts are piles of something very soft and smelly. They’re huge, almost double the size of the final book,” she chuckles. “I throw everything in—I have to—and then I edit, because I know I’m good at editing. That’s part of the beauty of having a big, messy first draft, because then I feel like I’m in a warehouse full of ideas and words and thoughts and stories. Then I can just pick and choose.”

Her unique creative process produces that rarest of wonders in fiction: verisimilitude. In Three Pines, clues to the mystery are often dropped casually over café au lait at the bistro, and so subtly that we talk ourselves to sleep wondering whether to trust them, and if they’ll ultimately form a whole. Only a writer with Penny’s instincts could wait until an author’s note at the end of The Nature of the Beast to reveal a walloping fact that’s as shocking as the book’s climax (don’t peek; it’s worth the wait!).

While it’s not a spoiler to note that a serial killer haunts this latest installment, Penny admits she’s not about the body count, and never will be.

“I’ve been on a number of writer panels where people say, ‘Well, when it gets slow or boring, I just throw in another body!’ And I think, that can’t be right,” she says. “I’m not interested in body counts or serial killers; I’m really interested in the why. What would make a real-life human being do something like that? The murder is just a conceit to allow me to look at all sorts of other issues.”

Which explains why the village setting not only appeals to Penny, but may well have been inevitable.

“What always amazes me is, there is a tendency to dismiss crime novels set in a village or rural setting rather than in a city. As someone who lived in cities all my life, murders in Montreal are in the briefs column of the newspaper. It’s always tragic but it’s not horrific; it’s not a shock, it doesn’t set the whole community on edge,” she says. “But a murder in a tight-knit community? How big of a violation is that? Not only has a person’s life been taken, but your whole sense of security has been taken. And knowing that someone you know was murdered and someone you know did it? How horrific is that?”

Although Penny had a brief brush with cinema, serving as a consultant and executive producer on the 2013 film version of her first Gamache novel, Still Life, she’s an admittedly poor candidate to go Hollywood anytime soon.

“I don’t know about films. I was involved, but I’m not anymore, by my own choice. While they did consult me, they did not take a great deal of what I said; there was no onus on them to take anything to heart, and I found that very difficult,” she recalls.

Nor should readers expect any non-Gamache standalones. Penny readily admits she has found the perfect cast and setting to accomplish her primary goal as a mystery writer.

“I want the reader to care, and if you don’t care, why bother? I want the books and characters to follow the reader for days or weeks after,” she says. 

“I want to try to bring down the fourth wall, to where they feel they’re actually sitting in the bistro listening to the conversation; they can smell the wood smoke and taste the café au lait and feel what the characters are feeling. I think if someone just reads my book with their head, they’re missing probably two-thirds of the book. You have to absorb it through your heart.”

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The premise of Dean Koontz’s mesmerizing new psychological thriller, Ashley Bell, is compelling but not complex: When doctors inform 22-year-old Southern California surfer girl and budding novelist Bibi Blair that inoperable brain cancer will shorten her life to a matter of months, she replies, “We’ll see.”

Bibi’s fate seems sealed until a mystery man with a golden retriever (Koontz and his beloved Trixie?) appears at her hospital bedside in the middle of the night and quotes a snippet of Henry David Thoreau in passing: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

The incident sparks a miraculous recovery. Bibi’s subsequent meeting with a fortune-telling masseuse convinces her that she’s been spared specifically to save the life of someone else, someone named Ashley Bell. Strap in and hold on as this determined surfer “walks the board” to suss out the whos, hows and whys of her improbable reprieve. 

Readers will savor the most stunning experience yet from a writer who specializes in surprises.

So far, all that sounds like classic Koontz, right? But through an equally unlikely turn of events in the crafting of Ashley Bell, what readers can now savor is arguably the most stunning, flat-out crazy reading experience yet from a writer who specializes in surprises.

If you’ve ever wondered how much fun it would be to feel a book unfold in real time along with its characters, you need to read Ashley Bell right now.

Koontz’s wild ride began with a friend who had been diagnosed with gliomatosis cerebri, a rare, fatal brain cancer. After reading a letter from his pal, who had already outlived his doctor’s one-year prediction by a year, Koontz wondered, “Wouldn’t it be nice to write a story in which somebody is doomed to this but isn’t doomed to it after all?” To take his personal feelings out of play, he cast a surfer girl in the lead, while setting the story in his hometown of Newport Beach.

“The moment I heard her character say, ‘We’ll see’ in my head, Bibi became nearly complete to me,” Koontz recalls. “I realized she would be somebody who almost likes the sharp edges of life and leans into them.”

Koontz was initially stumped by the tougher task of figuring out how Bibi might escape the medically inevitable until the answer absolutely “hammered and prosecuted” him, to use surfer speak.

“The big reveal in the book came to me, and I was like a child; I was basically jumping up and down in my chair!” Koontz says. “And I thought, this is going to be a wonderful thing for people to get to, but how do you make it real? I couldn’t wait to start it.”

It’s no big reveal that there will be no big reveal here. When a writer has managed to catch this kind of lightning in a bottle, every reader should experience the full jolt.

Chapter by chapter, Koontz watched as Ashley Bell coalesced around an existential, philosophical difference between Bibi and her hippie parents, Murph and Nancy. 

“It’s the idea of free will versus fate; Bibi believes she will make her own life, and her parents believe that fate determines what happens. Then it becomes perfectly natural for her to use her free will to find her way through this,” he says. “But I also realized that it was going to be about deception, self-deception and imagination.”

Especially imagination. Along the way, Koontz salts Bibi’s journey with a sweeping assortment of characters, some of whom threaten to shoplift the narrative and take it home. They include Bibi’s fiancé, Pax, a Navy SEAL on his last covert mission; her childhood bestie Pogo, who’s something of a surfer Yoda; hospital security guard Chubb Coy, a stalking Mr. Toad menace who quotes Jack London and Thornton Wilder; and a parade of horrific Wrong People who threaten to end her journey at every turn.

Koontz takes particular delight in skewering literary academia with the character of Solange St. Croix, a spiteful doyenne whose utter disdain for Bibi’s writing gifts makes her the meanest witch in the faculty lounge. For Koontz, who wrote his own way out of a career as a Pennsylvania English teacher decades ago, it’s not academia per se that’s troubling; it’s the limiting perspective.

“I’m not sure it’s a good thing that so many writers are going to school to become writers. When I became a writer, people like John D. MacDonald and a lot of writers I admired never went to school to be writers; it was just something they wanted to do because they loved books. I’ve often wondered if, over time, the writing programs will lead to a homogenous kind of fiction that isn’t very healthy,” he explains.

His own love of wordplay is apparent in Koontz’s clever twist on the fortune-teller trope. His muddled medium, a loopy New Age masseuse named Calida Butterfly, uses a divination technique called Scrabblemancy, in which Bibi draws Scrabble tiles from a silver bowl. Naturally, one of the phrases they spell out is “Ashley Bell.”

“I didn’t want Calida to have a Ouija board or a crystal ball or anything we’ve seen before. Then it occurred to me that all magic and all forms of belief are based on words—the idea that words have power and were at the root of everything that came to be,” he recalls. “Scrabblemancy makes more sense than having a little pointer on a board full of letters.”

To ground firmly in the here-and-now what might otherwise seem an ethereal journey, Koontz conjured one Birkenau Terezin, a neo-Nazi cult leader whose corporate minions terrorize Bibi.

“In my lifetime, I’m watching anti-Semitism return to the world stage in a major, very spooky way. I think it’s a bigger issue now in many places in the world than it was in the 1930s or ’40s,” Koontz says. “So it seemed logical, if you were going to reach for a villain in a book like this, Terezin would be the guy who is very suitable to our time. And the book wants to be very contemporary. I made every effort to keep everything in it very much of this period we’re living through without beating a lot of drums about it.”

Once Koontz caught a whiff of the uncharted magical reality he was creating in Ashley Bell, the question of the big twist began to weigh on him. Was he concerned that some readers wouldn’t make the leap to the third act?

“In any story where there are big surprises, I always feel the reader has to be able to go back and say, my God, it was right in front of me all the time! But in this case, I realized that’s not going to be enough.”

“In any story where there are big surprises, I always feel the reader has to be able to go back and say, my God, it was right in front of me all the time! That makes it fair. But in this case, I realized that’s not going to be enough,” he says. “With this book, the reveal is not just an intellectual thing; it’s an emotional thing. That way, when the reader starts reading it and is trying to get their head around it, they have a feeling that it makes sense. The two together make this thing go down in a way I don’t know that it would have otherwise.”

For once, Koontz, as the author, is sharing a surprise usually reserved for his readers.

“This book is about imagination; I think that’s what allows it to feel like it’s almost unfolding in real time as you’re reading it,” he says. “Bringing those many threads together gradually came easier than I would have ever imagined. The characters allowed me to do it. They showed me the way and it was exhilarating.”

This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

You’ve cited To Kill a Mockingbird as inspiration for this novel, but you began writing it before Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman came out. How did Lee’s “found” manuscript affect how you felt about this book? How do you think it will affect future Harper Lee-inspired novels?
My book was well under way when the discovery of Watchman was announced, so I shrugged and said to myself, “Keep going.” I don’t think Watchman is a game-changer for anyone who wants to revisit Mockingbird. In fact, I think it gives people more license to rethink the book.

What was the process of writing this novel and building the contrast between attitudes in past and present? Did the 1980s narrative come first, or did you initially place yourself in present-day Lu’s world?
When I’m playing with time, I usually dabble in both the past and present to get a feel for what’s going on, then opt for a straight-forward chronological approach. So the sections about the past were written first, then I followed the events of 2015. But I had a pretty clear idea of what was going on in 2015.

What do you admire most about Lu?
Her loyalty to her family.

What was most personal about this novel for you? What was the furthest away from yourself?
Lu’s decision to follow her father, professionally, and her desire to protect him and his reputation—that was very personal for me. Her extracurricular life, if you will, is not something I would do.

What mysteries and thrillers do you think everyone must read?
People should read what they love. That said, I wish people would read with a heightened awareness of sexism and racism.

What do you love most about writing thrillers?
I love being engaged in a form of writing that can work on so many levels. The best, best thrillers—bear in mind, I’m not saying I write them—should be able to entertain the person just trying to survive a plane ride, but also engage a person looking for something more serious. They are layered, capable of being many things to many readers.

What’s next?
A novel set in the pre-internet year of 1995, when disappearing was a little bit easier.

Author photo credit Lesley Unruh.

It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! All month long, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best mysteries and thrillers. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a daily dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.

What was your inspiration for the Orphan Program?
I have a great Roladex filled with guys who have operated in all sorts of fields under all sorts of cover. I’ve built up enough trust for them to talk to me on and off the record. I never know where the germ of an idea will come from—sometimes while talking to them over a beer, sometimes from an article I might stumble over. A lot of times they’ve discussed different black operations or programs they’ve been involved in. When I struck on the idea of the Orphan Program—a deep-black government program that pulls kids from foster homes and trains them up to be assassins—I used my contacts to make sure that the training, infrastructure and process felt genuine.

“I didn’t want anything to feel like bullshit Hollywood training, where Evan was running around catching flies with chopsticks.”

Smoak has some good reasons to be paranoid. Does researching for a character like this up your own paranoia? (Are you building a panic room?)
Yeah, sometimes you stumble into some creepy stuff on the web that you can’t unsee. I went down a black hole researching ISIS at one point and it got pretty sketchy. But there’s a lot of cool stuff, too. The idea for ingested GPS nanochips in Orphan X came from an article I read about a medical product that doctors use to track insulin levels in diabetic patients. I thought: Wouldn’t that be cool if Evan used it instead as a secret GPS transmitter?

My favorite research though is out in the field. I didn’t want anything to feel like bullshit Hollywood training, where Evan was running around catching flies with chopsticks. So once I had a handle on who he was, I spent months doing research. I went to Vegas to visit one of my consultants, a world-renowed sniper and armorer, who got me onto every gun I write about, from Benelli combat shotguns to custom 1911 pistols. I trained—badly—in mixed martial arts, familiarizing my face with the training mat. I talked to guys who led operations that you’ve seen on CNN, who have gone into hostile territory, under deep cover, or played offense in some of the most dangerous theaters in the world. I’d say that now and then, depending on who I’m talking to and how deep the conversation goes, topics come up that pull back the veil on what we view as ordinary life, and that can have me looking over my shoulder a bit.

Talk of an Orphan X movie began almost immediately, with plans for Bradley Cooper to produce and possibly play the character of Smoak. Does this affect your vision of the character in any way?
It sounds odd to say, but it really doesn’t. I chose to submit the manuscript exclusively to Bradley Cooper because I thought he was the perfect actor to play Evan Smoak. But until the moment I pow-wowed with my film agents about how we were going to approach the film rights, I didn’t put an actor’s face to Evan. I saw him as I do in my head. Even after working on the adaptation, that’s still the only way I see him.

What was most personal about this novel for you? What was the furthest away from yourself?
The key line in the book for me is when Jack (Evan’s handler) tells him, “The hard part isn’t making you a killer. The hard part is keeping you human.” And I think what hits closest to home for me is Evan’s struggle between intimacy and perfection. It’s very difficult to have both. But even in the face of being a perfectionist, Evan strives for human contact. That’s the heart of what I connected with when I found this character—the conflict deep within Evan. Because everybody, no matter how tough, no matter what training they’ve received, has a need for human relationships in the real world. And one thing we never get to see? Is James Bond going home. Or Jason Bourne having an awkward moment with a single mom in the elevator of his condo. What would that really be like? What’s personal about that for me is that I struggle sometimes coming out of my work life and the fictional world that I’m creating (and can control) into the real world with all its messy and wonderful complications.

The furthest away from me is probably 1. That I’m not a top-tier assassin (sad-face emoticon). And 2. That Evan’s drink of drinks is vodka. And for me? Bourbon wins every time.

What mysteries and thrillers do you think everyone must read?
So many. Red Dragon, Mystic River, Motherless Brooklyn, Demolition Angel, Trust Me, The End of Everything, Blood Work, Manhattan Nocturne, Laguna Heat, The Genius, Case Histories. . . . I could keep going forever.

What do you love most about writing thrillers?
I love when I’m all the way inside an exciting sequence and the world and time cease to exist.

What’s next?
The next Evan Smoak book, The Nowhere Man, comes out in January. And The Book of Henry, from an original screenplay I wrote, comes out this year from Focus/Universal.

Author photo credit Nancy Rose.

Once again you focus your crime fiction on events in the news that concern Muslims worldwide—this time, present-day Islamophobia and the war on terrorism. In what ways does the novel medium allow for you to best explore these issues?
I think the value of using the novel as a medium to write about jihadism and Islamophobia is that it allowed me to explore all points of view without judgment. I was attempting to tell this story with more nuance than the typically black-and-white constructions of “Us vs. Them” that we often see.

In these constructions, “we” are always superior and on the side of right, while “their” actions are brutally senseless. But when you’re writing a novel and creating characters who have these different sides to them, it allows for the humanization of those whose humanity we aren’t prepared to accept. And it also allows for an examination of a problem that’s occupied me a great deal of late, which is guilt by association. With a character like Esa Khattak, how dogmatically can one cling to the idea that Islam and terrorism are synonymous? Everything about Esa flies in the face of that. So in a way, the novel form allows us to examine our judgments and preconceptions.

“When you’re writing a novel and creating characters who have these different sides to them, it allows for the humanization of those whose humanity we aren’t prepared to accept.”

One element of the story is based on the foiled 2006 plot to blow up Canadian Parliament. Why did you decide to reference this real event?
When the news of the plot became public, it was painful to realize that jihadist ideology could be exported anywhere. There are disenfranchised individuals vulnerable to ideological predators even in places as welcoming and inclusive as Toronto. I wanted to explore how individuals could arrive at a place where they would accept violence in the name of faith, given those circumstances. What were they running from or to, and did they really see salvation in it? Putting Esa Khattak in charge of the investigation was a way of making those questions personal and familiar.

What do you admire most about Esa Khattak? About Rachel Getty?
I admire Esa for being a man who knows who he is and what he stands for, without believing himself superior to anyone else. He’s open to the world, and he finds beauty and value in diversity—he’s willing to question himself, and he confesses his doubts without shame. People who think in ideologically rigid terms are either terrifying or deadly dull—Esa is neither: His faith has taught him to reserve judgment in pursuit of a deeper understanding.

With Rachel, I admire her compassion, and her confidence in her skills as a police officer. She’s a flawed person, but she’s grown from the challenges she’s faced, and she has a great deal of natural courage because of her compassion. The idea that only hard, cold logic can lead you to the truth is absolutely foreign to Rachel, who tends to lead with her heart, and I think that’s what makes her interesting as a character.

What was most personal about this novel for you? What was the furthest away from yourself?
The first few pages of Chapter 15 describe Esa’s thoughts as he wrestles with the question of what it means to be Muslim in a world that’s largely hostile to Muslim identity. That’s very personal to me, particularly in the years since the September 11th attacks, where we’re consistently seeing political debates framed in terms of “Islam vs. the West.” As a Muslim born and raised in the West, and of the West, I find identity has become increasingly difficult to navigate. I often hear my entire community described in terms that are nightmarishly exaggerated and untrue. I was able to have Esa reflect on that, and search for his footing from firsthand knowledge.

Furthest away from myself? The family relationships for both Esa and Rachel are quite dysfunctional, whereas I come from a large, close-knit family where my siblings are my closest friends in the world, and my parents are my enduring role models. We’re always in each other’s business, and I’ve come to the conclusion we like it that way.

What mysteries and thrillers do you think everyone must read?
For psychological suspense and incredibly impressive plot construction, Reginald Hill’s pair of novels: Dialogues of the Dead and Death’s Jest-Book. For unvarnished kindness and fantastic immersion in the history of Quebec, Louise Penny’s Bury Your Dead. For place and atmosphere, Peter May’s The Blackhouse, is a heartbreaking book set in the Scottish Hebrides. And for a series that steadily probes, ponders and grows, anything in the Duncan Kincaid-Gemma James series by Deborah Crombie, though Dreaming of the Bones is an old and dear favorite. For a character I wish was my best friend, Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce who stars in The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.

What do you love most about writing thrillers?
The chance to tell stories that don’t often see the light of day. My books are centered around contemporary human rights issues. To have the opportunity to shape suspenseful stories where the reader has to know what’s coming next, in the context of these issues, is a great gift.

What’s next?
I’m currently at work on my third Khattak-Getty novel which is partially set in Iran, and centers on the story of an Iranian political prisoner. And I’m deeply immersed in my new fantasy series about a female warrior-scholar who must reclaim a sacred text to save her people from enslavement. The Bloodprint, the first book in the series, will be published by Harper Voyager in Fall 2017. In the meantime, I’ll leap at any opportunity to travel in the name of research!

Author photo credit Alan Klehr.

It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! All month long, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best mysteries and thrillers. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a daily dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.

You’re clearly fascinated by criminal fugitives and the fugitive narrative, as your dissertation on the subject became the book On the Lam. You’ve described fugitive stories as “sister to the Western” or to the American road story. What is it about the fugitive narrative that fascinates you? Why do they seem to be an American tradition, and how does Dodgers contribute to that tradition?
I lucked into my dissertation topic about June 17, 1994, the day that O.J. Simpson rode his white Bronco across Los Angeles. It was a hell of a day to watch TV—I’d gathered a houseful of friends to watch the first day of the World Cup, or so I’d planned. We ended up eating the food, drinking the beer, sending out for more, staying up halfway to dawn watching.

There’s nothing uniquely American about crime novels. Seems to me that most novels are about crimes—or breaking the law, at least. What we in the U.S. do more consistently, more reliably, is to link the run from the police with other tales of movement and self-refashioning—the pioneers, imagining themselves anew in what they call virgin land. Slaves, ripped from Africa, then from each other, and then finding a way out of the South. The cross-country move, the spring break road trip, the exhausting family vacation, the SUV commercial. Each argues that crossing the American distance is transformative. And that transformation is especially relevant to criminals, to characters on the run. More thrillingly so than Raskolnikov’s years in a prison.

Dodgers sure belongs to that tradition—Huckleberry Finn, Thelma and Louise. What does it contribute? That’s a grand question, a little grander than I’d trust an author to answer. Let me volunteer just that white Americans have traveled the landscape, at least the landscape that genocide emptied out for the last century of cars and roads, differently than people of color have traveled it. Maybe East reminds us how that mythic landscape isn’t quite the same for all of us.

Your narrator, East, is a tough kid—but he’s still just a kid. How did his 15-year-old perspective shape this story?
Right. I can only say that it’s central, it’s essential. He’s an unusual 15-year-old: quiet, wary, sharp-eyed, suspicious. His toughness is tangled up with fear. He hasn’t had the luxury of much of a childhood. At the same time, he’s on that cusp between boyhood and manhood, where his capabilities and his innocence and his ambition and his awkwardness can’t be sorted out from each other.

You’ve said that you want readers to take away from this novel “maybe a thought or two about compassion,” especially in respect to East. And our reviewer indeed said Dodgers “will upend your notions of the sort of character with whom you might empathize.” Is this something that drives you as a writer, to seek out and humanize the types of characters that someone else might overlook?
It seems like a noble project, doesn’t it—but I think that really describes fiction in the last century too. Bayard Sartoris, Pecola Breedlove, Olive Kitteridge. The fiction we write, and the fiction we choose to reread and reteach, has helped shape how we think about and empathize with other people.

What was most personal about this novel for you? What was the furthest away from yourself?
I was 15 and very wary, very observant. But I’ve never lived through quite the dark nights that East has.

What mysteries and thrillers do you think everyone must read?
One thing I’ve been saving for myself later this summer is the pleasure of going back and reading Stephen King’s Night Shift. I treasured that book as a teenager, and teenagers are usually right about books, more right than adults.

I am a fan of midcentury pulp: Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, Chester Himes, Steve Fisher’s I Wake Up Screaming. I always forget to acknowledge Native Son. Native Son is a remarkable book. P.D. James’ The Children of Men. I’m fond of stories about the end of the world.

What do you love most about writing thrillers?
Thriller readers want pace. By temperament I’m a little slow. So the genre is corrective. It shuts me up.

What’s next?
Hopefully a summer of good reading and writing. I have a two-foot stack of books on my nightstand at the moment. And I’ve done some work on another piece involving these characters. I did not write Dodgers imagining that there would ever be anything like a sequel. But there’s a door standing open at the book’s end. It’s intriguing to see what might lie beyond it.

Author photo credit Olive Beverly.

It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! All month long, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best mysteries and thrillers. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a daily dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.