Richard North Patterson has grown a bit discontented with the praise heaped upon his recent best-selling novels. "’Better than Grisham’ has no more or less meaning than ‘worse than Updike,’" he says wryly during a phone call to his summer home in Martha’s Vineyard.

"I never set out to be the master of the courtroom thriller. I just happen to think the law is a good vehicle for writing about a lot of things. What has come to annoy me a little is the shorthand description ‘courtroom dramas.’ It reduces what I’m doing to a kind of trick. To the extent that my books work, it’s for the same reason that any book works — because the story, the characters, and the ideas are arresting. What’s gratifying to me about No Safe Place is that it just changes the subject entirely."

That’s right. Richard North Patterson’s arresting new novel — his best novel yet — has little to do with the law and even less to do with courtrooms. No Safe Place is about national politics and political campaigns. "For years I’ve thought about writing a political novel," Patterson says. "The question was always whether I could do the work and have the access that would make it a serious book. I mean a lot of political fiction is awful. Silly stuff. There hasn’t been a really strong novel of national politics since Advise and Consent, and that was more than 40 years ago. It’s a form I like and one that has fallen on hard times, so in 1995 I decided that I had the time and the wherewithal to take on such a book."

Set in the year 2000, No Safe Place follows the dramatic primary campaign of Kerry Kilcannon, a liberal-leaning U.S. Senator from New Jersey who is challenging the heavily favored sitting Vice President, Dick Mason, for the Democratic presidential nomination. The contest comes down to a crucial primary in California, where Kilcannon’s older brother James was assassinated 12 years ago during his own presidential campaign. In the final week of the California campaign, Kilcannon alienates key supporters on issues concerning abortion rights, is stalked by a religious fanatic who has already shot up an abortion clinic on the East Coast, and learns that unknown opponents are peddling damaging allegations about an extramarital affair to the national media.

In less able hands such a plot would yield an overheated potboiler at best. But Patterson’s political portrait is wonderfully laid out, thrilling, intelligent, and nuanced. Senator Kilcannon is an immensely appealing central character who carries a heavy emotional debt to his slain older brother. He struggles to tell the truth and remain authentic but is not afraid to play hardball politics and is certainly not infallible on issues of tactics or morality.

Patterson points to the life of Bobby Kennedy as one influence on his portrait of Kerry Kilcannon. "Obviously Kerry isn’t Bobby Kennedy, and certainly his relationship with his brother isn’t anything like the relationship between President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy. But I’m not sure I would have written Kerry Kilcannon this way if it weren’t for the resonance of Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy’s spontaneity, reaction to direct experience, impatience, and internal war between the practical politician and the Romantic are elements you see working in Kilcannon. Those moments of spontaneity are really engaging because so many politicians are so robotic, are essentially programmed to follow a plan. The notion that you have somebody who is not only incapable of doing that but who realizes that his salvation lies in refusing to do that is very, very interesting."

Much of the book’s suspense depends on the moment-by-moment shifts of campaign strategy as Kilcannon and his staff scramble to deal with threats of scandal. To get these details right, Patterson spent a lot of time with top political strategists from both political parties, including Ron Kaufman and George Stephanopolous. "I explained the story and said ‘Okay, you’re advising Kerry Kilcannon. What do you tell him?’ Essentially we worked out this hypothetical campaign. It was just fascinating."

During his research, Patterson also came to know and admire Secretary of Defense William Cohen and Senator John McCain, "both of whom have an absolute core, an idea of themselves that involves more than looking around a room and seeing how other people feel about them, an idea about themselves that transcends whether they are returned to office or not." Former President George Bush, "a modest man and a real gentleman" taught him about the "incredible focus and competitive drive you need to be President. It’s almost like having an extra chromosome."

Says Patterson, "I came away with the sense that the good politicians are better than we know and better than we have a right to expect, given the corrosive nature of the fundraising system that exists, the demands of the office, the absolute loss of privacy, dignity, and even respect. I mean, we all know the system’s crummy in a lot of ways, and we all know that it tosses forward a lot of people we wouldn’t want to have to dinner, but what we don’t appreciate is how good the good ones really are."

Patterson also manages to seamlessly weave into his dramatic narrative some of the most complicated challenges of American national politics — issues of character, gun violence, abortion, race relations, and the changing role of the media.

In fact the novel, which was completed last October, seems drawn from this morning’s headlines, which comes as no surprise to Patterson. "I have a theory that if you get it right, sooner or later it’s going to happen. Since I completed the book, we’ve had the Lewinsky matter, the Birmingham abortion clinic bombing, numerous occurrences of violence with guns, questions of whether the Secret Service can be called upon to testify on what it knows about a candidate’s life. All of those issues are floating around in my book. I think they are pretty predictable ones. Many of them flow from the kind of meltdown of standards that has occurred when you have so many different media outlets — including such non-traditional ones as the tabloids and Internet gossip columns — competing to define what is and what is not news."

"One of the points I am trying to explore in this book is the basis on which a candidate’s private life is reported and the difference between fact and truth. There are a lot of excuses offered for printing things that are based on assumptions that are either unknowable or an enormous stretch. I’m not suggesting that there aren’t times when personal conduct isn’t a matter of public concern, but I wonder if we haven’t gone too far in looking into every corner of a candidate’s life. In any event, that’s one of the things I really wanted to do with this book — provoke some thought on these very questions."

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California.

When readers fall in love with a character, it can be excruciating to have to wait a year (or more) for the next book in the series to be published—think of the crowds of people who flocked to stores at midnight to get the latest Harry Potter.

That might be one reason for the interesting back-to-back publication of three new mysteries by Laura Caldwell: June brought Red Hot Lies this month’s offering is Red Blooded Murder and Red, White & Dead will hit bookstores in August. So readers charmed by the series’ feisty, red-headed heroine, Izzy McNeil, won’t have to wait long for their next fix.

Izzy bears a definite resemblance to her creator: both she and Caldwell have red hair, law degrees and live in Chicago. And yes, feisty is applicable to both, too. Speaking by phone from her office at Loyola University’s School of Law, where she is a professor and Distinguished Scholar in Residence, Caldwell’s pleasure in her character is evident, dubbing her “the younger, taller, hotter and cooler me!”

“I guess what you’re supposed to do in life is go minute to minute, and that’s kind of what I’ve been doing with Izzy. It just started clicking, and moving, and I loved the character, and I loved writing those books. I’m writing a nonfiction book right now [about her work with Loyola’s Life After Innocence Project], but I’m ready to go back and start on number four.”

Caldwell certainly puts Izzy in some real pickles. In the first book, Red Hot Lies, Izzy’s biggest client is murdered, her fiancé disappears with the deceased man’s money, and her employer suggests she take an “indefinite leave of absence.”

This “fresh start” scenario is a topic Caldwell herself finds intriguing, and she continues it in her next two books. Red Blooded Murder puts Izzy in a new career, working as a reporter for Trial TV until the brutal death of a colleague places her under suspicion for murder. And in Red, White & Dead, Izzy dashes off to Rome to search for a vital piece of her personal history . . . and escape some Mafiosi killers in the process.

Caldwell is fascinated by the myriad ways people regroup—or not—after the life they thought they knew gets yanked out from under them. “Unless you live in a hole, that happens to everyone throughout their life. Someone dies, you’re in a car accident, or someone breaks up with you, you lose a job; there are a million examples, and I’m always fascinated with how people respond. So that’s why Izzy, in the beginning of book one, everything she really identifies herself with gets pulled away from her. . . . It was fun to be along for the ride as an author.” While Caldwell has no intention of putting Izzy in the backseat, she has created characters in all three books she’d like to play a more prominent roles in future books.

“I really am hoping to have different characters step forward now. I want Maggie [Izzy’s best friend] to play a bigger part. I also think Izzy’s mom is a fascinating character and based on what happens in Red, White & Dead, she’s got a lot of stuff to deal with, too. . . . So what I’m hoping with this series would be that all these characters would be fleshed out enough that as one develops or changes, it does affect other people.”

One word of warning: Those captivated by Izzy McNeil in Red Hot Lies may want to ration out Red Blooded Murder and Red, White & Dead. After this series jump-start, it will be a year or more before the fourth book in the series is released. That kind of wait could have frustrated readers wishing they’d been a little more judicious and a little less greedy. 

Rebecca Bain writes from her home in Nashville.
 

Best known for his books about Detective Inspector John Rebus, Ian Rankin has written a suspenseful winner with The Complaints, our March Mystery of the Month. Starring Malcolm Fox, a member of the internal affairs department of the Edinburgh police force, BookPage's Whodunit columnist calls The Complaints "superb on every level."

Get to know Rankin a little better in his Q&A with BookPage—in which he shares his "words to live by," his proudest moment and more:

Name one book you think everyone should read (besides your own!).
The book everyone should read is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark—a perfect, short novel, in turn hilarious and terrifying.

How did you approach writing stand-alone novels after so many books with Detective Inspector John Rebus? Were you nervous about disappointing fans?
A lot of fans were sad to see Inspector Rebus retire, but I have enjoyed the challenge of presenting them with new characters and stories. The Complaints has been well received, which gives me hope that I continue to exist, even without my shadow twin!

Describe The Complaints in one sentence.
The Complaints: An internal affairs cop fights for his job and his sanity in a city on the edge of physical and moral bankrupcy.

Where do you write?
I write in a room in my house. The house is a large, Victorian-era property in a leafy suburb of Edinburgh. My office would have been one of the bedrooms. I have a desk, a sofa and a hi-fi system in there. That's about all I need.

What was the proudest moment of your career so far?
There have been many highlights, from the thrill of first publication, to (eventual) success, the Gold Dagger, Diamond Dagger and Edgar. But I was probably most pleased with a letter from the Queen. She intended to award me with the OBE (Officer of the British Empire) for "services to literature." It was proof that the mystery novel was regarded as literature—who am I to argue?

If you had to be stranded on a desert island with one fictional character, who would you want it to be?
Not Rebus—we'd just fight. Maybe Molly Bloom from James Joyce's Ulysses—a fascinating, earthy, practical human being. I'm sure she'd have stories for the campfire.

What are your words to live by?
Words to live by? Words are my life—I love all of them equally.

 

 

Write what you know. While writers are told that every day, a writer’s work is naturally that much better if what they know is pretty cool stuff. In Scott Turow’s latest book, Personal Injuries, the best-selling legal thriller writer takes what he knows his personal experience as a prosecutor in a major judicial corruption probe and turns it into a fast-paced and intricate story that is as much about what goes on in people’s heads as what goes on in courtrooms.

Turow, author of the top-selling Presumed Innocent and Burden of Proof, draws on his background as a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in Chicago to weave a tale of undercover operatives and deception. But he makes the characters especially Robbie Feaver, the personal injury lawyer who is flipped by the prosecution and used as a stalking horse to rein in corrupt judges as complex as the plot. Instead of creating what could have been stock players in a typical genre story, Turow, as he does in all his books, gives his characters a depth and a humanity that make their troubles that much more deeply felt.

BookPage spoke to Turow about the legal background that led to the story, about personal injury lawyers, and about being undercover both in life and in law.

BookPage: How close was your own experience [in the early 1980s] to the case in this book?

Scott Turow: A lot of the events in the book are things that I witnessed first-hand. When I was an Assistant U.S. Attorney, I had a large role in cases such as this one. There was one large undercover project, called Operation Greylord, that was aimed at the judiciary in Illinois. I was assigned to run a decoy, above-ground, highly visible investigation of judicial corruption in one court, while the undercover operation was going on in the criminal court. Then I was assigned to try to flip a criminal lawyer whom we had a case on. All the while, I was in this world of need-to-know. I knew there was an undercover investigation, but I didn’t know who they were or what they were doing. I was working side by side with them and didn’t know. It was kind of weird. In some ways, this book was the story of what I witnessed and took part in.

BP: Talk about the life of the undercover operative that you observed, and that you put in the book. [Note: One character, FBI agent Evon Miller, spends nearly a year undercover working with Feaver as a paralegal.]

ST: They try to get folks in places where they’re as close as possible to their own life. I’ve known agents who pretended to be Mafiosi or to be fences, which are actually very far from who they really are. I remember a female IRS agent who posed as a Mobster girlfriend for a time. Most of them don’t live it for the extended period of time that Evon did. But the guys I knew who infiltrated a crime family in Milwaukee did so for more than a year. It’s a tough life.

BP: Working with witnesses such as Robbie must be difficult. You have to ask them to do a tough job, and support them while they do it. Yet you know that they’re criminals. How do you handle that as a prosecutor?

ST: Those kind of dilemmas are commonplace when you’re a prosecutor. You’re always in that position with the flipper witnesses. It’s a very ambiguous relationship. You’ve pursued these people, they want to ingratiate themselves with you to get a lower sentence, you want something from them . . . but you know in the end you’re going to stand up in court and ask to have them sent away. What happens is that you develop some complicated personal relationships. You hate their guts when you see them for what they are, but you can also become beguiled by them in a certain way. At the end of the day, you get mixed feelings about standing up and saying, Send him to the penitentiary. Experiences like that were really the inspiration for Robbie.

BP: Speaking of Robbie, you cast him as a personal injury lawyer, the kind of lawyer who often gives lawyers a bad name . . . the ambulance chaser. What do you think of that profession in general?

ST: As the novel presents, there is a scamming aspect to the acquisition of business by these types of lawyers, and because they have a vested financial interest that gives them an inclination to push the envelope. In Robbie’s case, that was pushed a lot further than is right by anyone’s definition. All of those aspects tend to bring some personal injury lawyers into disrepute. On the other hand, as the novel is pretty honest about and notwithstanding some of the egregious aspects of their work, many really do care about their clients. You have to give them an enormous amount of credit in this country for having been responsible for a lot of reforms that benefit individuals, especially in the areas of sexual harassment, civil rights, and consumer rights. The plaintiff’s bar has been responsible for bringing to heel huge vested interests that were beyond the corralling of the political system.

BP: Two sides to every coin, it seems. That’s a big part of this book, in fact of many of your books.

ST: Yes, that’s a pretty durable Turow theme. Everyone has two sides. The tension is between the reality of life and who human beings really are. Everyone is pretty well intended in this book, even the crook Robbie and the overbearing prosecutor Stan Sennett. Sennett’s goals are good ones, he’s just over the top. It’s the inability of the laws and institutions to accommodate these fine differences in people that has always provided a theme for me. In this case, it’s particularly helpful to have that theme. The thematic wedge into this notion is the idea of being undercover, of playing a role, and that everyone is trying to pretend to be something that they’re not.

James Buckley Jr. is an associate editor with NFL Publishing in Los Angeles. He is the author of Eyewitness Football.

"Crossover" is a word heard more often in music than in publishing. Rarely does a writer who is extremely successful in one genre venture into another. Part of this phenomenon is the result of reader expectation and the ensuing pressure from publishers. Oftentimes, it is simply an author’s choice.

This makes James Patterson’s latest novel, Cradle and All, quite a surprise for his many fans. Patterson, best known for his Alex Cross thrillers, has ventured into an area few mainstream authors have attempted: spiritual millennial fiction.

With his trademark rapid-fire chapters, Patterson tells the story of Anne Fitzgerald, a former nun turned private investigator sent to investigate two pregnant teenagers. Besides being pregnant, the two girls share one other trait: They’re both virgins. Patterson recently talked to BookPage about the genesis of this novel and his own development as a writer.

BookPage: Your latest novel, Cradle and All, is a departure for you in some ways, isn’t it?
James Patterson: Well, it’s a little like When the Wind Blows in that there’s a little bit of the spiritual in it, a little bit of the supernatural. But yes, this one’s a little different. What brings all my books together, though, is the desire to make them real page-turners.

BP: Your publisher describes Cradle and All as "an entirely reimagined version of a 1980 Patterson novel, Virgin. That book is long out-of-print. Readers might want to know how this came about. What inspired you to "reimagine this book? In what ways is it reimagined?
JP: You’d have to read both versions, the old one and the new one, to have a real appreciation of how it changed. I think a lot of writers like to look at old work again. When Virgin came out, I always thought it was a terrific idea, but I don’t think I got it right, so I just kept fussing with the idea. It’s been out-of-print for a long time, so the publisher said "what about bringing Virgin out again? Once I got into it, I decided I wanted to rewrite it. I restructured it a lot, especially changing the main character, Anne Fitzgerald, to a private investigator.

BP: You have an interesting take on writing through female voices. How have you developed such an ability to capture women characters?
JP: I think it goes back to when I was a kid. I grew up in a house full of women grandmother, mother, three sisters, two female cats. I cooked for my grandmother’s restaurant. I’ve always been most comfortable talking to women. My best friends generally tended to be women. I liked the way they talk, the fact that a lot of subjects weave in and out of conversations. Sometimes men are a little bit more of a straight line.

BP: How did you begin writing fiction when you came from a background of marketing and advertising? At one time, you headed the J. Walter Thompson agency, right?
JP: I was writing fiction before I got into advertising, actually. My graduate thesis at Vanderbilt, in fact, was fiction. I was in a doctoral program in the English department and decided I wanted to move on to something else.

BP: So you came out of an academic background in fiction, and yet and I mean this as a compliment your work is decidedly unliterary. It’s accessible, story-driven, and character-driven. Was this a conscious decision or was this an evolution in your life as a writer?
JP: A conscious decision. I read Ulysses and I figured I couldn’t top that, so I never had any desire to write literary fiction. I never read commercial fiction until I was around 25 or 26, and at that point I read two books: The Exorcist and The Day of the Jackal. And I went, Ooh! This is cool. I like these. It’s a different experience from reading literary fiction; it’s a different reward. And I set out to write that kind of a book, the kind of book that would make an airplane ride disappear.

BP: There’s an ongoing discussion or conflict between popular and literary fiction.
JP: Yes, and I think it’s a silly thing to argue about. There’s plenty of room for both. Unfortunately, what happens in the book world is these petty arguments go right out to the populace, so you have an awful lot of reviews constantly trashing or demeaning the novels that are out there. If you look at the movie business, they’ve learned to be generous to both movies that are serious and movies that are more frivolous.

BP: Speaking of the movies, have you been happy with the way Hollywood has treated your novels?
JP: Yes, for the most part. Kiss the Girls was fine. Morgan Freeman was great. But there was a television movie adaptation of Miracle on the 17th Green that wasn’t all that great.

BP: Is there another movie version of Alex Cross coming out?
JP: Yes, Along Came a Spider is in production right now, with Morgan Freeman doing the role again. It’s supposed to be out October 8, but that might be a little optimistic.

BP: And what’s next for Alex Cross? Is another one in progress?
JP: Yes, it’ll be out next November. And I have a new series debut coming out as well. I’ve finished the first book. It involves four women who get together to solve murders. Each of the four women is involved in a different job, but the one thing they share is a level of frustration in their work, primarily from men. They all work in male-dominated professions and then get together in their spare time to solve murders without any interference from men. It’s sort of a Women’s Murder Club.

BP: So again, the female voice?
JP: Yes, when I created the Alex Cross character, there was a certain amount of eye-raising because he was a black man. And then I’ve written all these stories from a woman’s point of view.

BP: So you’re comfortable writing outside your "comfort zone"?
JP: I would be more uncomfortable writing a Tom Clancy military novel or a race car novel or anything like that. Where I’m writing is my comfort zone. I couldn’t write anything else.

Steven Womack is the Edgar-Award winning author of Murder Manual. His latest novel is Dirty Money (Fawcett).

The Kellerman household seems to be in a state of controlled uproar on this particular afternoon. Faye Kellerman is leaving in the morning for a nine-day book tour in Germany. There is a hum of activity in the background during our phone conversation. Last minute preparations and pressing household matters occasionally take Faye away from the call.

"She's never been to Germany," Jonathan Kellerman tells me during one of his wife's absences. "They've wanted her to come for many years." He says her tour will focus not only on Stalker, Faye's current thriller, but on many of the other novels in her popular Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus detective series. "She's a big personage in Germany," he adds with obvious pleasure.

Of course Jonathan Kellerman is no slouch himself. He has written more than a dozen bestsellers in his Alex Delaware series since the mid-1980s. Commenting on the first, When the Bough Breaks, Stephen King announced that Jonathan Kellerman had reinvented the detective novel. Ardent fans continue to agree.

His latest effort, Dr. Death, centers on the brutal murder of a Kevorkian-like figure. Suspicions fall on the husband of one of Dr. Death's most recent "patients." As always, Los Angeles, vividly described, is also a character in the novel. Many advance readers (including this interviewer) think it may well be his best book yet. Jonathan, who gave up a career as a noted child psychologist to write full-time, believes the book is his most successful attempt to interweave a family psychopathology theme and "a really creepy killer."

Together, the Kellermans have an extraordinary publishing record. Each produces a novel almost every year, an astonishing pace to sustain for the better part of two decades. Stalker, which focuses on the experiences of Peter Decker's daughter, Cindy, as a rookie in the LAPD, is Faye's most successful book to date, the first to crack the top five in the New York Times bestseller list. Jonathan's last book, Monster, was a bestseller in both hardcover and paperback.

As we continue the interview, Jonathan mentions that one of their four children is also working on a novel, "a brilliant historical novel, a rather ambitious and wonderful book," he calls it in one of those warm, big-hearted comments that typify his conversational style.

Jonathan is illustrating a point about the importance of plot. He says his son has come to realize that at some level or another all literature is mystery. It's an excellent point. It's a point that puts Jonathan at odds with much fashionable contemporary writing. And it's a point on which Faye and Jonathan emphatically agree. Unfortunately, I am too distracted to quite take this in. I am thinking: What? Four children? Two prodigious, very successful writing careers under one roof? And now, possibly, a third? How is this possible? How do they ever manage it?

"Doing well in marriage is a good preface to doing well in a household like this," Faye says. "I think the key to managing this is the art of compromise."

"Right," Jonathan says. "Faye and I were married 12 or 13 years before either of us got published. It wasn't as if the two of us met at a writer's conference and brought these egos in. Faye was 18 when I met her; I was 21. To the extent that we've grown up at all, we've grown up together. The fact that our relationship was solid before we got published really helped."

It seems to be true. Throughout the hour we spend talking, the Kellermans graciously take turns answering questions; they trade jokes and witticisms; they encourage one another with praise and endearments and thanks. They say they really don't compete, that they are honestly happy for each other's successes. They seem genuinely to respect one another's work.

Asked to comment on each other's strengths as writers, they are quick to answer. "From the very outset, Faye had a golden ear for dialogue," Jonathan says. "It took me a while to learn to write dialogue. But Faye could do it right away because she's always been a gifted mimic. She also has an innate sense of pacing. Her books are lean, never padded. The story moves along at a rapid pace, because Faye is that kind of person. She's a busy person. She doesn't have a lot of patience for wasting time."

Faye responds, "Jonathan's strength is his consistency in always writing a fantastic story, his ability to keep the story moving and his wonderful prose. He uses the perfect metaphor — not five perfect metaphors. He's able to inject much more into his thrillers than the average thriller-writer because of his training as a psychologist and his keen insight into people."

In fact, the only thing resembling a dispute comes up during a rambunctious discussion of the movies. The two spar playfully over which is the greater movie, Jaws or The Poseidon Adventure. They come to a sort of agreement on Titanic. "That movie finally picked up once they hit the iceberg," Faye exclaims gleefully. "I mean once the water started pouring in, I turned to Jonathan and said, 'All right! Now we've got a movie!'" Jonathan agrees, and adds, "But for me, it wasn't worth waiting through two hours of sloppy romance for 20 minutes of iceberg."

To be honest, all this warmth and tenderness is a little disconcerting. And the Kellermans know how I feel. "I'm always wary of interviews like this," Jonathan says, partly in jest. "What happens is that we come across as disgustingly smug and goody two-shoes. Honestly, we don't have any big skeletons in our closets. But we're both extremely intense people, with very artistic temperaments. There's no doubt about it."

Of the two, Jonathan is probably the most intense. "Everything, everything seems destined to impede my writing," he says. "I'm so paranoid about this. I see life as a series of obstacles. I've got to get into my office and not be distracted. I'm just a fanatic about achieving focus, just trying to shut the door and shut off the phone. My secretary knows not to come in for anything short of an emergency."

Then, during one of Faye's absences, Jonathan says, "Faye has been so wonderful in taking care of me that she basically leaves me free to do this. She manages to do everything, so she's a lot more impressive as a human being."

"Anything that's great takes a lot, a lot, a lot of work," Faye says, later. "We like to write our books and we're grateful that they're successful, but we do work. This is a job. I mean this is a working household."

"Faye and I are very much enmeshed," Jonathan says. "We have four kids, we hang out a lot together, we both work at home, we generally have lunch or breakfast together three, four, five times a week. So we're like a retired couple. Our writing is the only private time we have. We each go into our little offices and close the doors. We're each pretty protective of that. We talk about the financial part of the business but we don't talk much about creative aspects. We don't talk shop."

So the success of this immensely productive marriage isn't just about compromise and work and family? It is also about allowing, even encouraging, private, creative spaces?

The Kellermans definitely agree. In fact, Faye might be speaking for them both when she says, "We love each other, but this is a very personal thing. Jonathan and I collaborate on almost everything that pertains to life. But we want our stories to be our own. For better or for worse, our books are our own personal little slices of life."

Alden Mudge writes from his home in Oakland, California.

Author photo by Jesse Kellerman.

Author George P. Pelecanos has created his own niche as the "best kept secret in crime fiction." The critics love him, but after eight gritty urban novels, the Washington, D.C.-based writer has yet to crack the U.S. bestseller lists or achieve instant name recognition. And that's just fine with him.

"I don't think my books are for everybody," the soft-spoken author said when BookPage caught up with him at a recent ClubMed mystery writers conference. "I totally cooperate with everything [my publisher] asks me to do, and I want the book to succeed, but I've stopped having unreal expectations for any of my books. All I want to be able to do is write another book."

Just the kind of answer you might expect from the easygoing author. But with his growing cult following in the U.S., a thriving fan base overseas and plenty of cheerleaders inside the industry, his name might not stay a mystery for long. "He's the best," raves former touring partner Dennis Lehane. Along with Lehane, authors like Elmore Leonard and Michael Connelly are heaping praise on Pelecanos' latest book, Right as Rain.

Like all of his previous novels, Rain is set in the working class suburbs of Washington, D.C., a side of the federal city that has nothing to do with politics. The story involves former cop Derek Strange, a Samuel L. Jackson-like character with cool confidence, who now heads his own P.I. firm, Strange Investigations. He's hired to investigate the death of an off-duty black D.C. cop who was gunned down by Terry Quinn, a white cop with the unpleasant combination of a quick temper and a chip on his shoulder. Although Quinn was cleared of any wrongdoing, he's tormented by the thought that race made him pull the trigger. He volunteers to help with Strange's case and the unlikely duo of killer and investigator create a unique partnership.

Pelecanos, a Greek-American, has created plenty of multi-ethnic characters in the past, but here he tackles the race issue head on. The racial tension is always just below the surface in his honest look at prejudice on both sides.

Describing his novel as an "urban western," Pelecanos says the story is based on actual events that were happening in Washington during the time he wrote the book. Several black officers had been shot by other policemen and the majority of those shootings were by white cops. Pelecanos researched the book by riding along on several midnight to dawn shifts to get a sense of their job.

"It's a real interesting shift," he says. "You really see what's going on. All the straights are in bed, and the people who shouldn't be are [the only ones] out there."

He also did what he has always loved — just "get out there and listen to people talk." Which might explain why dialogue comes so easy to him.

"I've been listening all my life," he says. Every summer as a kid in Washington, D.C., he would travel across town on the bus to work for his dad's lunch counter downtown. The various conversations he overheard on the bus fascinated him. "I was always interested in not just what they were saying, but the rhythms of their speech, the slang. Just a love of the language."

There are a few other things that Pelecanos is obsessed with, like basketball, cars, music, movies and ladies shoes. Each obsession has a history, and each of those elements finds its way into Pelecanos' books. He put himself through college selling shoes on straight commission ("the best job I ever had"), describes himself as a movie freak who, as a boy, dreamed of becoming a movie director, and admits he used to own a jacked-up Camaro. To him, the kind of car you drive and the music you listen to say a lot about your character. So can he explain the guy/car phenomenon?

"It's something about having a beer between your legs, the music up loud, a girl beside you," he struggles to explain. "Yeah, my books are for guys, I would say. It's another thing keeping me down," he laughs.

Even if you don't get the car thing, maybe you'll understand the vast and varied music references that punctuate his descriptions. It's been suggested that his books should come with a soundtrack, and it's not a bad idea.

"I do understand that I'm alienating a certain part of the audience that doesn't listen to that music. I don't expect people over the age of 60 — just to pick a random age — to know what I'm talking about," he says. "It's sort of like I can't help myself or something. The things that I write about, the settings I write about, people are listening to music. If you've got a book set in the kitchen of a restaurant, the radio is the most fought over appliance in the restaurant all day long. I know because I worked in plenty of kitchens. When people start talking about what they're listening to or why the other guy's music sucks, you start finding out about their characters."

Pelecanos knows all about blue collar jobs because he has amassed quite a resume over the past 30 years: bartender, truck driver, line cook, valet and don't forget shoe salesman. He was general manager of a $30 million company when he had what he calls an "early mid-life crisis."

"That's when it all fell apart for me," he says. "Because what I thought was going to happen was that I'd buy a company or own my own business, and I didn't want to do that. I just didn't want to get in my car every day and be like everyone else. In a way, you can say it's a personality flaw of a lot of writers — they can't really conform. They question everything, from authority to driving the same route everyday."

Despite the fact that he'd never tried to write anything before, he quit his job and started his first book. He finished the largely autobiographical A Firing Offense a year later.

"You've got to remember, I was just a guy saying, 'I want to write a book.' I didn't have any formal training. I never took a writing class, so I'm sure the people around me that loved me were thinking, 'He's gonna fail.' And how would they know, and how would I know, that I could write a book? I just thought that I could. I just had the idea that I could," he says.

And whether or not Right as Rain is a huge hit, Pelecanos will be content as long as he can keep writing seven days a week and churning out one book a year.

"I'm always one book ahead," he explains. "I can write another book before the next one comes out, and I don't have to worry about what people said about that one. I just put something else in the hopper and keep the cycle going."

It’s 16 down and 10 to go. Sue Grafton is working her way through the alphabet with the mystery series featuring private investigator Kinsey Millhone, and this month she follows O is for Outlaw with her latest release, P is for Peril. Coming up with plenty of title possibilities for the letter "P" was not a problem for this prolific author.

" ‘O’ was tricky," Grafton explains, "but when you come to ‘P,’ you’ve got poison, pistol, peril, persecute, prosecute, prison, police, whatever — you can go on and on."

Just don’t ask her what the book is about, because she candidly admits in a phone interview from her home in Louisville, Kentucky (where she was born and raised) that she’s "already forgotten it."

"I’m on to the next one," she says, "and my only survival skill is to delete from my brain anything that doesn’t exactly pertain to the book I’m working on."

More on Q is for . . . to come, but right now we’ll give the rough cut for Peril. At the center of the mystery are Dow and Crystal Purcell, a quintessential California couple: he, elderly and wealthy; she, cute, tanned and curvaceous, not to mention 40-odd years his junior. When Dow goes missing under mysterious and sinister circumstances, Kinsey Millhone is called in to investigate . . . by Dow’s ex-wife, no less.

Grafton’s latest possesses all the humor, charm and attitude that have compelled readers to show their devotion to the feisty P.I. by naming their daughters in her honor. "Originally they were naming their dogs and cats Kinsey, so I think I’m moving up the food chain," she laughs.

Grafton admits she based her character on herself. "Kinsey Millhone is my alter ego," Grafton says. "She is the person I might have been had I not married young and had children, so it is fun that I get to live her life and mine."

For several years, Grafton was living a life neither she nor Kinsey would have wanted. Grafton had moved to Hollywood after college and for 12 years she made her career in TV writing. The only problem was, she hated it.

"I knew I had to get myself out of Hollywood because it just did not fit me at all," she says. So she took the advice of her father, an attorney who wrote mysteries on the side, and started plugging away at A is for Alibi. Five years later, she finished it and four months before it was published, her father died.

"I never got to sit down and ask him about plotting and how to come up with good premises. He was a whiz at it, but we never got to talk shop," Grafton says. And since Grafton is determined not to repeat herself in any of her storylines it would have been nice to have some help on the road to Z is for Zero.

"I thought they’d get easier; I thought after eight or 10 letters I’d get the hang of it. But I am convinced there are 26 things to say about homicide," she says determinedly.

We promised to get back to "Q," and while Grafton won’t give away any plot secrets ("never talk about a work in progress"), she will say that she has chosen Q is for Quarry as the title, "both the sense of rock quarry and in the sense of hunted," she explains.

Robin Cook’s latest medical thriller may seem like yet another example of the author’s uncanny ability to anticipate national controversy, in this case the uproar over federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. After all, the Harvard-trained medical doctor-turned-novelist has been writing well ahead of the public-debate curve since his breakout novel, Coma, nearly 25 years ago.

But in fact, Shock, Cook’s expose of the private infertility industry, was actually delayed nearly a year by an arrival of a different sort — Cameron Cook, the author’s first child.

Did fatherhood turn life upside-down for the 61-year-old dad?

"Oh wow, absolutely!" he chuckles by phone from his home on Martha’s Vineyard. "Especially since the boy took over my writing room. I wrote the last two books on a card table in the living room."

Impending fatherhood may have played a role in turning the doctor’s mind toward the dramatic possibilities behind the closed doors of America’s infertility clinics. It is largely within these privately funded clinics that controversial stem cell research is being conducted because the federal government, beset by anti-abortion groups, has refused to grant it funding.

Shock, named for the technique of fusing two cells, is a return to form for Cook, whose last outing, the Atlantis-themed Abduction (2000), was considered pretty farfetched even by science fiction standards. This time out, he’s back to what he does best: spinning a suspenseful tale, one that places curious female Harvard grads in mortal danger as they seek to uncover the truth about a mysterious clinic that’s harvesting more than HMO dollars.

When the two grad students — prim-and-proper Texas debutante Deborah Cochrane and her street-smart New York girlfriend Joanna Meissner — answer an ad in a campus newspaper to earn $45,000 by donating eggs to the Wingate Clinic on Boston’s North Shore, their goal is to raise enough money to write their master’s theses in Venice. But when Deborah wants to know more about the fate of her eggs, the clinic stonewalls her. Undaunted, the pair concocts aliases to obtain employment at the creaky former psychiatric hospital. Suffice it to say that going on for their doctorates might have been the better choice.

Cook admits the timing of Shock was fortuitous. "I suppose you could say that it’s the most like Coma in that it deals with an issue that everybody seems to be concerned about," he says. "I wrote this book to address the stem cell issue, which the public really doesn’t know anything about. Besides entertaining readers, my main goal is to get people interested in some of these issues, because it’s the public that ultimately really should decide which way we ought to go in something as ethically questioning as stem cell research."

As a doctor, Cook marvels at the enormous potential of this evolving medical field. "This is the most promising aspect of medical research that has ever come along. It’s going to make even the discovery of antibiotics pale in comparison," he predicts.

"Up until now, all of the medicine that we’ve done has not been curative; it’s been a way of helping the body’s own defenses in some form or fashion. This stem cell research has the potential for creating true cures for many human illnesses. If you’re a doctor, the idea of actually having the ability to cure people rather than just kind of putting your finger in the dike and keeping it there is the most exciting aspect of it."

Pro-life groups, however, have condemned stem cell research for tampering with human life, albeit at the microscopic level.

"That is the main problem, that it does brush up against the whole abortion issue, which has been a real conundrum in this country," he says. "Because the government up until now has decided not to fund this research, it pushes this research, which is going to be done, into the private labs, just as I do in the book. And once it’s in the private labs and nobody knows what they’re doing, they’re doing whatever they like."

Which brings up everybody’s favorite question: Couldn’t that make human cloning a reality?

"Yes, absolutely," Cook insists. "With the pressure on the infertility clinics, that alone is enough to encourage people to ask for it and various and sundry researchers to go ahead and do it. There is no question in my mind that it’s going to happen. Again, part of the reason is that all this can be done behind closed doors, and they use private money, so it will happen."

The author admits he never thought he would have so much compelling material to work with when he began writing fiction in 1970 after completing medical school at Columbia University and post-graduate training at Harvard.

"If I tried to be the writer I am today a number of years ago, I wouldn’t have very much to write about. But today, with the pace of change in biomedical research, there are any number of different issues, and new ones to come," he says.

No longer in private practice, Cook remains on the staff of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston. Keeping his lab coat handy helps him turn our fear of doctors into bestsellers.

"I joke that if my books stop selling, I can always fall back on brain surgery," he says. "But I am still very interested in it. If I had to do it over again, I would still study medicine. I think of myself more as a doctor who writes, rather than a writer who happens to be a doctor."

And after 23 books, he has come up with a diagnosis to explain why his medical thrillers remain so popular.

"The main reason is, we all realize we’re at risk. We’re all going to be patients at some time," he says. "You can write about great white sharks or haunted houses, and you can say I’m not going in the ocean or I’m not going in haunted houses, but you can’t say you’re not going to go in a hospital."

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Naples, Florida.

Author photo by John Earle.

When he was just out of law school, Brad Meltzer quickly joined the ranks of John Grisham and Scott Turow with his nail-biting debut thriller, The Tenth Justice. Four bestsellers later, he’s still reveling in a job that gives him inside access to the Supreme Court and the White House.

"I love digging around for the details. They are the most fun," Meltzer says from his home in Washington, D.C. "Hollywood lies so much to us that when you take the time to get it right, it becomes amazing." He researched his latest thriller, The Millionaires, for more than two years, but the topics he explores couldn’t be timelier. Crafting a story of two brothers on the run for stealing way more than they intended, Meltzer dove into subjects now on everyone’s mind: how people can change their identity and just disappear, and how the super-rich keep their millions hidden.

"It is so pathetically easy to change your identity in this country that it’s not funny," he says. "I thought it was going to be hard, [requiring] masterful, evil villain thinking, and it’s not. It’s simple. And that’s what’s truly scary." The Millionaires centers on Oliver, a rising young associate at a swank private bank in New York, who discovers that his boss is sabotaging his plans to get into a top MBA school. In a fit of anger, he agrees to his brother Charlie’s plan to steal $3 million from an inactive account about to be turned over to the government. To Charlie and Oliver’s thinking, no one will ever miss the money since the owner is dead. But it turns out quite a few people want the money, and the two boys are soon on the run as they try to figure out who’s chasing them, and how $3 million turned into $313 million.

Meltzer threw himself into his research and in no time learned how to get a fake Social Security number and passport. He discovered the art of garbage reading and the wonders of Nice N Easy hair color to create a new appearance. "Sometimes the dumb things and the easy things are the most effective" when trying to disappear, he says.

Meltzer even hired a private eye to put him under investigation. With just his name, he told the detective to find out everything she could on him. For an author who admits he’s paranoid, the results were scary.

"Within two minutes, she had everything," he says. "She had my Social Security number, my address, my former addresses. She had all of my relatives and my neighbors. She had my phone number, and once she gets your bank info, she can get your credit cards. In no time at all, she had my entire life laid out in front of her." But to Meltzer, The Millionaires is about more than stealing money and finding privacy in a world where everyone can see you.

"It’s about what we dream of as dreamers," he says. "It’s about what you think you want from life and realizing that sometimes it’s OK not to get it."

The journey for Meltzer’s characters inevitably hits close to home. "Every book that I write, I finish it and say, That’s the most personal character I’ve written." Meltzer sees part of himself in the serious, hardworking Oliver who struggles with money and class issues in a world of wealthy entitlement. "Our backgrounds are very similar," he says. "It’s always been the thorn I step on."

At 13, Meltzer was suddenly uprooted from Brooklyn when his father lost his job and did a "do-over of life" by moving the family to Florida with just $1,200. His parents lied about their address so Meltzer could attend the rich kid’s public school, and suddenly he was surrounded by families with more than one car and kids planning to go to college.

"In terms of feeling like you’re the outsider looking in on the rich person’s life, I felt like that was my entire life when we moved to Florida," Meltzer says, adding "That’s what Oliver was based on the kid who wants more."

Now 31, Meltzer still populates his thrillers with young protagonists with grand plans and plenty of idealism. Usually in their 20s, the wannabe lawyers and bankers have their lives all planned out, until, invariably, everything goes wrong.

"It’s just a magic time. I think it’s the best time to write about. And maybe this is just my belief in how power really works," Meltzer says. Meaning that without the "little people" to drive the cars, send the faxes and work the computers, the big shots would be up a creek. "I feel like in some ways I’m forever trapped there in the low part of the totem pole," he admits, "but thankfully so."

Meltzer, like one of his young, eager characters, thought he had his future mapped out. With one year to go before starting law school at Columbia University, he took a job in Boston at Games magazine. And like one of his twisting, turning thrillers, nothing went as planned. The job turned out to be awful, and Meltzer remembers thinking, I have one year and I can either watch a lot of television, or I can try and write a novel. "I know it sounds insane," he says now, "but it just seemed like the most logical thing to me."

Maybe his plan was crazy, because Meltzer eventually received 24 rejection letters for his literary novel Fraternity. But he fell in love with the process of writing and early into his first year of law school, the idea came to him for The Tenth Justice. Being a paranoid person, Meltzer says, writing thrillers came naturally; he had found his niche. The Tenth Justice was so successful that after finishing law school, he devoted himself to writing full-time and never practiced law.

Although he made his mark by writing about lawyers, Meltzer wanted to take a new direction with The Millionaires. "I did not want to forever rely on the big Washington power structure to scare the reader," he says. So he moved the action to New York, left out the lawyers and tinkered with the thriller structure.

"Usually you always know who the villain is and why the character is in danger. And in this book, I said, Let’s know neither of these things. Let’s see what happens when the character doesn’t even know why he’s in trouble, if he can figure his way out of it," Meltzer explains.

He charged into unknown territory, but didn’t lose an ounce of the Meltzer magic. The 482 pages fly by with pulse-pounding suspense, and the unraveling secrets chase you to the end. Joey, the female insurance agent in The Millionaires who’s smarter than both the bad guys and the good guys, sums Meltzer’s style up best: "The best games always keep moving."

Fans of best-selling thriller writer Greg Iles may be surprised to find him crossing over into Stephen King country with his latest psychodrama, a spooky supernatural tale called Sleep No More.

As it happens, the Natchez, Mississippi-based Iles has been hanging out with the master of horror lately. Several months ago, longtime friend and fellow thriller writer Ridley Pearson invited Iles to join the Rock Bottom Remainders, the infamous all-author classic rock band headed by King, Pearson, Dave Barry, Amy Tan, Scott Turow, Roy Blount Jr. and a revolving cast of characters.

It was a natural choice. Like Pearson, Iles used to make his living as a rock musician (he was guitarist and vocalist for the band Frankly Scarlet) before switching to fiction writing. But he'll never forget the thrill of meeting the rest of the Remainders for the first time.

"I mean, here I was, the night before the gig, sitting in Amy Tan's loft having a conversation with Scott Turow," he says by phone from Natchez. "People frequently ask what it's like to have made it and I looked around that loft, at Scott and the other people in the band, and I thought, I'm happy, man. This is what it's about. They just took me in like a family. They're the nicest people in the world." While he and King have since become friends, Iles says he followed his own muse into the supernatural.

"This book is about something almost everyone has experienced: a passionate love affair that haunts you for the rest of your life."

"Actually, the plot of Sleep No More has been with me for a long time. Now, the willingness to actually use the supernatural in the way that I did, I wasn't always sure I would go that far. But I don't think I picked that up from Steve; I think I just did what I've always done and I was willing to go a little farther. I just did it the way I had to do it and I think the readers will go with me." That's entirely possible. In seven novels during the past decade, Iles has been something of a free-range maverick, pursuing historical thrillers (Spandau Phoenix, Black Cross) and serial killers (Mortal Fear, Dead Sleep) with equal aplomb.

"I would say that almost every book I've ever done has been a departure for me," he admits. "The formula today is basically to rewrite your last book. I just follow my nose; I write about what interests me each year. I don't put a governor on my imagination, you know what I mean? When something comes to me, I just follow it and do it."

Sleep No More centers on John Waters, a successful petroleum geologist and family man who spends his life drilling holes in and around Natchez, hoping to tap enough crude oil to reward his investors. He's a man obsessed with what lies beneath the surface of things, whether it's a Mississippi river bed or the subtleties of small-town society.

One day while coaching his daughter's soccer game, he notices a beautiful woman watching him from the sidelines. Her seductive stare seems hauntingly familiar; years ago, he escaped an obsessive love affair, only to learn later that his former lover had been killed under mysterious circumstances in New Orleans.

Or had she? As he pursues the mysterious Eve Sumner, she leads him into dark places of the heart that defy his scientific method.

"If I'm anything, I think I'm a psychological novelist," says Iles. "This book is really about something almost everyone has experienced at some point and that is a passionate love affair in the past that haunts you for the rest of your life. So rather than just explore it on the literal level, the use of a supernatural device allows me to really delve into the intensity of those feelings." Iles sets Sleep No More in Natchez, where he grew up as the dutiful son of a physician.

"I was in the National Honor Society, captain of the football team and all that," he recalls. "I was always a very intense kid, very serious and searching, but I also went through the motions of being a normal kid." Natchez serves as the perfect setting for his modern-day Southern Gothic.

"As far as the supernatural, I think the South always has that legacy of appearance being very different from the underlying reality; I think there's a sense in the South that there's so much hidden, so much is repressed, that anything is possible," he says. "And there's also a sense in the rest of the country that we're still a little backward; that communication is not as good, there's not as much civilization, there's not as much law holding human impulses in check. I think a lot of that contributes to a vibe and the feeling that anything is possible."

Iles admits his unique creative process leaves little room for a series or sequels.

"When I deal with characters, I like to completely explore that character down to the bottom of his life, and once you've done that, it's hard to go back," he says. "I think it's like Murder, She Wrote; I mean, how many murders can happen in one small town, much less in one character's life?" The author's free-range philosophy recently extended into screenwriting; his script of his 2000 thriller 24 Hours—the Sony film version has been retitled Trapped—is scheduled to hit theaters in September.

Meanwhile, he's hard at work crafting his eighth thriller and the first under his new three-book contract with Scribner. Although he still keeps rock-musician hours, writing all night and sleeping all day, Iles is willing to concede that this writing thing just may work out after all.

"I feel like that now," he chuckles. "It's when you first sit down to write that first book that you don't feel that conviction."

Jay Lee MacDonald is a professional writer based in Naples, Florida.

When Brian Haig graduated from West Point in the mid-1970s and started his career in the U.S. Army, becoming a best-selling novelist was the furthest thing from his mind. Now, with the release of his third novel, The Kingmaker, he finds himself a successful writer, and the way he reached that goal is nearly as good a story as the plot of one of his international thrillers.

Haig is the son of former Army General and Secretary of State Alexander Haig. He spent 22 years in the Army, mainly as an infantry officer and military strategist. In the early and mid-1990s, Haig became special assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John M. Shalikashvili, a role that gave him an insider's perspective on geopolitical affairs.

His military background served him well when he began writing fiction, a career decision arrived at almost by accident. When his wife informed him they were expecting their fourth child, "All of a sudden I realized there were big college bills looming in the future, which I wasn't going to be able to do on a military paycheck," Haig explained in a recent interview. It was time to look for opportunities outside the Army to support his growing family.

An offer came from AT&T to help build a global satellite network, with a salary two to three times his lieutenant colonel's pay. But AT&T needed him within a week. "I walked into my boss (Shalikashvili) and said Sir, I'm going to have to retire.' He told me he understood," Haig recalls, offering a dead-on imitation of General Shalikashvili's Polish accent. "When I told him [I needed to retire] tomorrow, he was very surprised, but he got it through." Before Haig could start his new job, however, a regime change at AT&T meant the company wasn't going into the satellite business after all. The job offer was off the table.

"I spent about six months trying to find a job. Because I was sitting around at home a lot, I decided to try reading some novels, which I hadn't really done before," Haig said. "Then I decided to try writing one, just to figure out the mechanics of it and see if I could do it." An opportunity to run an international helicopter company took him away from writing for a while, but when he left that job, Haig took a year off to devote himself to becoming a novelist. At the center of his work is protagonist Sean Drummond, a smart, sarcastic, but dedicated Army JAG lawyer. With a number of family members in the legal profession, including a brother who is a Washington, D.C., attorney, Haig saw the law as familiar territory.

Working each day from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. with breaks for meals and homework help for his kids Haig wrote three novels in that first year. A chance encounter in a New York restaurant with the wife of a literary agent ultimately led to Warner Books purchasing two of those novels, Secret Sanction and Mortal Allies. With his publisher soon contracting for an additional four Sean Drummond novels and Nicholas Cage's film production company optioning all of them, his writing career was secured.

"First-time readers often assume these are military books, but they're not. They're legal or international thrillers set inside that milieu," says Haig, who now seems as comfortable in front of a room full of book fans as he once was in the corridors of the Pentagon.

His latest novel, The Kingmaker, finds Sean Drummond defending an officer and former West Point classmate against charges of spying for present-day Russia. Dangerous political turf wars in both the U.S. and Russia threaten not just Drummond's ability to defend his client, but his life as well. Haig convincingly suggests that a shadowy group of oligarchs might have been the main force behind Russian President Vladimir Putin's rapid ascent to power. Seamless plotting sets Haig's work apart from his peers and makes The Kingmaker a compelling read.

Michael Grollman is a freelance writer in New Jersey.