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.

With his new book, The Jester, the creator of detective Alex Cross, the Women's Murder Club and a veritable metropolis of other characters, peers into the turbulent village and castle life of 11th-century France. In a dramatic change of pace, James Patterson best known for his contemporary suspense thrillers brings readers the story of Hugh De Luc, who leaves his young wife to enlist in what will come to be known as the First Crusade. When Hugh returns more than two years later, sickened by the cruelty and carnage he's encountered, he finds his home has been burned and his wife kidnapped by a local warlord. Hugh's mission henceforth is to right these wrongs by invading the courts of his enemies in the guise of a jester.

"I've had that story in my head for a dozen years," says Patterson, speaking from his home in Florida. "Most history has been written from the point-of-view of nobles or the people they've commissioned. The notion of a common person particularly a common person with a sense of humor was a story that really appealed to me. What we have here is a hero who's part Braveheart and part Jerry Seinfeld and Sherlock Holmes. That's kind of a fun combination." "Fun" is not the first word that snaps to mind as heads roll and blood spurts in the wake of Hugh's grimly determined quest. But the story does have its comic-book elements. The action is fast and unceasing; character development is minimal; the language is conversational; and the delineation between good and evil is broadly marked. Patterson and co-author Andrew Gross also endow their protagonist with some decidedly modern notions of social equality.

The period during which the Crusades took place, Patterson notes, "is an interesting time to read about. It's unbelievable what went on then. It's kind of interesting right now because we're right at the crossroads of another possible encounter between Christianity and [Islam] another holy war. . . . Back in those times, Hannibal Lecter would have been just another foot soldier. But beyond the violence, there's a black humor. When things get that bad, the only refuge we have is humor." So much has been written about Patterson's incessant output of books and his involvement in making them sell that he's become a bit weary of discussing it. How does he choose his co-authors? "I go to the phone book," he deadpans. And the division of writing chores? "We alternate words." Pressed for a straighter answer, he responds, "I don't really get into the process [of how I co-write], because every time I sort of lay out what I do, the next thing you know, somebody else is doing the same thing." Patterson says he met Gross through his publisher. "He had submitted a novel at one point, and it didn't get bought. But they thought it was an interesting book, and I read it and thought it was pretty good. We just started shooting the breeze, and we got along very well." Their first book together was the 2002 Women's Murder Club mystery, 2nd Chance.

Patterson's own tastes in fiction developed slowly and eclectically. "I went to a Catholic high school in upstate New York, and I didn't like to read at all. I still hate Silas Marner. However, my family moved to Massachusetts right after my senior year. I had to pay my way through college [by] working at a mental hospital. I had a lot of free time at night. I started reading everything I could get my hands on, and I found a lot of stuff that was terrific. In those days, I preferred the more outlandish

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

The Jester

By James Patterson

Little, Brown

ISBN 9780316602051

For the interviewer's benefit, Patterson looks around his admittedly "messy" office and counts out 19 separate "piles" of paper, each a book in embryo. Nearing birth, he says, are an Alex Cross novel, another in the Women's Murder Club series, "a kind of Suzanne's Diary [For Nicholas]" and an "offbeat mystery." NBC-TV, he continues, is ready to air a three-hour production of 1st To Die. A script has been written for another Alex Cross movie Roses Are Red and work has started on a movie treatment of Suzanne's Diary. Coming this summer, he adds, is Lake House, a follow-up to When The Wind Blows. The Cross novel, entitled The Big Bad Wolf, is due out this fall.

Not surprisingly, Patterson writes every day. What is surprising, though, is that he uses a pencil instead of a word processor. "I am not on the computer," he asserts. "My wife is. My 5-year-old is. I'm not. I'm sitting here right now, and I have the new Cross, triple-spaced, and I write between the lines. Then off it goes again and gets retyped, and back it'll come again. It just goes like that." Once his manuscript has been sent to the publisher, Patterson says he involves himself "a fair amount" in preparing to take the ensuing book to the public. "We kind of like to sit in a room and go, Do we like the book? Do we like the cover? Do we like the [proposed] tour? I think that's a healthy thing to do."

Patterson is proud of the diversity of his fiction, ranging as it does from historical to detective to love stories. "I'm not aware of anybody else who has done that," he observes. Would he ever write a western? "Yeah, I might. I'm doing one now that's set around the time of Teddy Roosevelt. So we're almost back to the West." Besides the variety of his books, Patterson points to another quality worth noting: "On a pure readership level, a pure, spellbinding, can't-put-it-down level, they're pretty successful. Forget about sales. They just move along real well."

Edward Morris is a Nashville-based music and entertainment writer.

<B>Going back into the cold: Novel draws on author’s FBI tenure</B> Jeremy Waller plies his trade against a backdrop of moral ambiguities. As a new member of the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team (HRT), he is sent on killing missions by officials he doesn’t know to work with people he’s never met to achieve political goals he sometimes views as shadowy or downright unfathomable. Without any advance notice to his wife and children, he is routinely spirited away to dangerous assignments around the globe. Despite his nagging misgivings, though, he is devoted to his job. In <B>Black</B>, Christopher Whitcomb’s gripping first novel, Waller is drawn into a lethal chess game that involves ruthless American CEO Jordan Mitchell, whose new encrypted cell phones threaten to enable terrorists to communicate undetected; U.S. Senator Elizabeth Beechum, who opposes Mitchell’s scheme; and Sirad Malneaux, a regal, mysterious beauty who’s willing to swap sex for secrets.

As befits the increasingly busy author, Whitcomb spoke to BookPage by cell phone (presumably an unencrypted one) as he drove to yet another appointment. A former FBI agent and a frequent television commentator on terrorist issues, Whitcomb admits that he based his characters on his own experiences. The pressure Waller feels, Whitcomb says, is the kind he dealt with: "It is an extremely demanding job, day in and day out. You have to be absolutely at the top of your game. All the training you do can be extremely dangerous. It’s all live fire, with regular ammunition. And there are helicopters and diving and things that very easily could kill you. They try to create in training some of the stresses you’d encounter in real life." Although the HRT is a division of the FBI, Whitcomb says that it’s not at all like the face of the agency that the public generally sees. "The idea that the FBI works inside the country, and the CIA works outside, is a myth. Most people don’t know that the FBI has more offices outside the United States than they do inside. The Hostage Rescue Team is given responsibility for a lot of that work outside the United States. Sometimes the host government gives approval, and sometimes it does not." Given Whitcomb’s background in undercover work, BookPage wondered if he was surprised at the brutal interrogation techniques recently exposed in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. "No, I wasn’t," he says. "I can tell you, because I taught interrogation at the FBI academy for two years, that we have techniques we use on paper, and there are techniques people use that are not written on paper. The waterboard [in which a subject is strapped to a board and immersed in water and which crops up in <B>Black</B>] is one of them. It’s been around for a long time. There are many techniques used, and not all of them are physical torture. Most are psychological." In <B>Black</B>, Whitcomb exhibits a fine eye for detail, right down to specifying the brand names of furniture and apparel. He concedes that one reviewer charged him with being "obsessed" with brands. Not so, he counters: "I’m driving down the road right now in a car. If I said, I’m driving next to a truck, you would say, OK, you’re driving next to a truck. But if I said, I’m driving next to an orange Peterbilt with little Playboy mudflaps on the side, you might get a better description. I was a writer before I was an FBI agent, and that’s what I was taught. I want to create the most accurate picture I possibly can." In 2001, Whitcomb released his first book, a nonfiction work titled <I>Cold Zero: Inside the FBI Hostage Rescue Team</I>. It told of his journey from a relatively bucolic New Hampshire childhood to his participation in the much-publicized shootouts at Waco and Ruby Ridge. Since he was still employed by the FBI at the time, the agency had to approve his manuscript. Black required no such vetting.

While the novel may put some HRT practices in a bad light, Whitcomb says he remains close to his former employer and the friends he made there. So why did he leave? "The bottom line is that I had 17 years in government service two years on Capitol Hill [as a speechwriter for a congressman] and 15 years with the FBI. From the time I was a little kid, my life’s ambition was to write fiction. <I>Cold Zero</I> gave me the opportunity to write fiction [in that] I realized I could support myself financially as a writer. It presented itself as a new adventure. And I’ve always been an adventurer." <I>Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.</I>

One month before the 9/11 terrorist attacks reduced the World Trade Center to rubble, Jeffery Deaver was having lunch at Windows on the World, catching up on Big Apple gossip with the chef and waitresses. The 107th-floor eatery had once been Deaver's hangout during the years he worked nearby as a Wall Street civil attorney. Since leaving the practice to write full-time in 1990 and moving to Virginia five years later, Deaver had made a Windows lunch into a pilgrimage of sorts whenever he found himself in the city.

The image of the towers toppling in flames slapped most of us abruptly into the present. For Deaver, the tragedy sent him in the opposite direction.

"I was looking for types of evil to write about and I got to thinking that I would like to do a book about institutionalized evil," he tells BookPage. "The religious fundamentalist terrorist, the Islamic terrorist is overdone, and frankly it's not that compelling to me. I mean it's easy to take a child, brainwash them, strap five pounds of C-4 on them and go kill people. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. There's nothing interesting or compelling about that dramatically. I wanted to do more complex institutionalized evil, and decided that the phenomenon that contemporary readers would be most familiar with was Hitler and the Nazis."

Welcome to Garden of Beasts, Deaver's 19th novel and the biggest departure yet for the master of the ticking-bomb thriller. The son of a Chicago advertising copywriter, Deaver was already a successful New York journalist, poet and singer-songwriter (he still performs) when he earned his law degree with the intention of becoming a legal correspondent for The New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Instead, he hired on with a Wall Street law firm and used his long train commutes to hone his skills as a thriller writer. Garden of Beasts, which he sets in the foreboding milieu of pre-World War II Berlin, has all the trademark roller-coaster plot twists and double blindsides as Deaver's addictive Lincoln Rhyme series (The Bone Collector, The Vanished Man). There is one chilling difference, however: these horrors really happened.

Paul Schumann is a German-American mob hit man and World War I veteran whose deadly effectiveness is tempered by his conscience; he only takes "righteous" hits. When he's busted by the feds, he is presented with a choice: Sing-Sing or one last assignment to kill Reinhardt Ernst, the architect of Hitler's ruthless rearmament. If he succeeds, a pardon awaits, with enough money to pursue a legitimate livelihood.

"I was intrigued by the idea of creating a morally ambiguous character who nonetheless stays true to certain aspects of his personality," says Deaver. "For instance, he would not shoot down a woman and child in front of him to get at his target. He's smart, he's there on a good purpose, and he's motivated by his own self-preservation, but also because he sees the terrible things going on there and wants to do something about that. He doesn't really have a lot to lose, so it's easier to think, my God, he might not make it to the end of this book."

The premise echoes that of The Dirty Dozen, one of the many war movies that helped shape Deaver's narrative style. "I was born in 1950 and my father was a gunner in World War II, so the atmosphere of the Second World War was something that I was certainly aware of from my youth. And the war stories and the espionage stories particularly the movies of the '60s and early '70s, The Dirty Dozen and The Day of the Jackal were just superb," he says.

In the novel, Schumann poses as a journalist accompanying the U.S. Olympic team to the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin. In addition to providing an expeditious way to slip Schumann beneath the Nazi radar, the Games afford Deaver the opportunity to introduce his historical cast, which includes Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and Goring as well as American gold medalist Jesse Owens. "Here was this country that was hosting this event to promote world brotherhood and sportsmanship, and all the while the camps were up and running and Jews and any political opponents were being systematically arrested and tortured and killed. What irony; here's Hitler and this magnificent stadium, I summon the youth of the world,' when meanwhile beneath the city dozens and dozens of secret prisons were operating."

When Schumann kills a storm trooper, it sets Inspector Willi Kohl of Kripo, the Berlin police, on his tail. A reluctant follower of the Third Reich, Kohl represents working-class Germans whose choices were few as the Nazis swept to power. Kohn trails Schumann to a military school where the psychological experiments of the new regime will horrify them both.

In one particularly chilling scene, Ernst returns home from a day of atrocities, kisses his wife and settles in to help his grandson build a boat, just another working stiff.

"The higher-ups knew exactly what was going on, and yet they would go home with this sense of, Well, I did a good job.' They didn't even have a sense that the rest of the world was condemning them for it. 'That was my job, I did it and I'm coming home to have schnitzel with my family,' " Deaver says.

Deaver admits he was surprised, and perhaps slightly complimented, to learn that German publishers had declined to release Garden of Beasts.

"They made me a very nice offer for my next two Lincoln Rhyme books (Gallows Heights is due in summer 2005), but they said we just can't publish this," he says. "That was their choice, of course, but I have to say the book was very accurate."

Jay MacDonald is a professional writer based in Mississippi.

Perhaps like me, you've always wondered: do spies read spy novels? The answer in Stella Rimington's case is an enthusiastic yes. "Oh, very much," insists the first female director general of Britain's MI5 intelligence agency. "I am an avid thriller reader and always have been. That is rather odd actually, that somebody relaxes by reading fictional stories about their own profession, but indeed I do and always have."

Rimington was a diplomatic housewife living in India in 1965 when she was offered a part-time clerical position by the MI5 operative in New Delhi. "I was reading Kipling's Kim at the time and I somehow imagined that it was really going to be rather like the 'great game' that Kipling writes about," she says. "But it turned out not to be like that at all."

Upon her return to London, Rimington joined MI5 full time as an intelligence officer and became successively the director of its countersubversion, counter espionage and counterterrorism branches. In 1992, she became the first woman chief of MI5; more significantly for Rimington, she was also the first director general whose identity was announced publicly, effectively blowing her 25-year cover.

"The press, particularly the tabloids, went mad," she says. "I knew beforehand and wondered whether it was the right thing to do at the time because I knew it was going to have a dramatic effect on me, particularly on my family. We had been protected by anonymity until then; the neighbors didn't know what I did and didn't care frankly. The press very easily found out where we lived and all of a sudden there they were, camped outside the house. We had to sell the house and move eventually, and effectively live covertly. That was a pretty upsetting start to my time as director general."

Rimington held that post until 1996, opening opportunities for women in actual intelligence gathering as opposed to the traditional administrative and clerical roles as characterized by Miss Moneypenny in the Ian Fleming novels. Speaking of Bond, James Bond, Rimington was the model for the first female M, played in the movies by Judi Dench. In reality, MI5 counters domestic threats, similar to our FBI without the police powers; Bond and M would have worked with the more swaggering MI6 foreign service, the equivalent of our CIA.

Rimington followed her distinguished 30-year intelligence career with a tell-some memoir, Open Secrets, that raised plenty of eyebrows at Thames House. Her first novel, At Risk, launches a planned series featuring MI5 intelligence officer Liz Carlyle, a thoroughly modern version of Dame Rimington in her salad days.

In At Risk, Carlyle heads up the search for an "invisible," the agency's worst nightmare, a British native whose ability to cross borders without detection is being used to stage an attack by an Afghan terrorist. Bruno Mackay, a swashbuckling MI6 operative, has just returned from Islamabad to help hunt down the terrorist. Charles Wetherby, Liz's taciturn boss, keeps a watchful eye over his talented young fledgling.

The terrorist has his own reasons for the target he has chosen; the author skillfully parses out this backstory to slowly tighten the tension as Liz works against time to figure out who is likely to end up on the receiving end of a backpack filled with C4 explosives. The invisible, too, has her own reasons for converting to Islam and becoming a Child of Heaven; the question is, can ideology alone overcome her upbringing?

We are immediately drawn to Liz, a focused, serious young career woman intent on using her analytical gifts to both further her career and fend off the testosterone-fueled cowboys like Mackay who would lead her astray in true Bond fashion. Deftly plotted, realistic in dialogue and detail, At Risk is a first-rate thriller with plenty to say about the strengths and weaknesses of the men and women on the front lines of the war on terror. It's also the first spy thriller in recent memory in which nobody goes to bed with anybody except the terrorists. Rimington builds a lovely verisimilitude between the two women antagonists, both struggling to fit into very different male-dominated worlds.

"They are two women who are in a sense fighting against themselves really; one has decided to break with her background and gone over to the other side, and the other one, Liz, is part of the established world but she's constantly asking herself if that's what she wants to do. So I think we've got that divine discontent that women often have that comes with trying to do two things at once and be perfect at everything. Working women, and particularly working mothers, find themselves trying to balance and always being dissatisfied that they haven't done it properly."

The days of Moneypenny are well over at MI5, which currently has a female director general. Rimington says queen and crown are better for it.

"I think women go about these sorts of things in a different way. That is why I think it is so important that women are involved in intelligence work. It adds a diversity to the whole. I don't think women are better at intelligence work than men, but they're different, and when you put the two together, you get a good mix."

But Rimington has no immediate plans to put the genders together in quite the James Bond sense.

"I think one of the difficulties with thrillers is, if you get too involved with the sex side of it, then it tends to take away from the excitement of the plot. We'll have to see; that's something I'm thinking about." 

Jay MacDonald writes from Oxford, Mississippi.

Israeli spy Gabriel Allon returns in Daniel Silva’s latest Daniel Silva watched the televised images of Yasir Arafat’s chaotic funeral last fall from several different viewpoints. As a former Middle East correspondent for United Press International, Silva had covered the bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict firsthand. Later, as a news producer for CNN’s Washington bureau, he had witnessed the false spring of the Oslo peace accords between Arafat and the newly elected Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin. Arafat’s grizzled countenance loomed large over events in the Middle East when Silva met his wife of 17 years, NBC correspondent Jamie Gangel, during a typical liquid press debriefing at the Diplomat Hotel in Bahrain. But what was doubtless foremost in Silva’s mind as the central Palestinian figure of our time was laid to unrest was the fact that he had just completed a thorough and scathing indictment of Arafat in his eighth novel, Prince of Fire.

“I was very much an Oslo person,” Silva admits by phone from his home office in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood. “I had placed faith in hindsight, perhaps too much faith in the ability of Yasir Arafat. I believed Yasir Arafat wanted peace at the time of Oslo. I do not believe that now, and that is reflected in the novel.” Prince of Fire once again wrests from retirement Gabriel Allon, world-renowned art restorer and former Israeli spy whose three most recent outings (The English Assassin, The Confessor and A Death in Vienna) form what Silva calls an “accidental trilogy” concerning the unfinished business of the Holocaust. Allon, who turned his back on “the Office” after his son died and his wife was horribly injured, is here drawn back into the game when his dossier is found in the home of a suspect in a series of anti-Semitic terrorist bombings.

Allon’s mission takes him from Cairo to London, the French Riviera to the Jezreel Valley as he races to outwit a master terrorist, raised from childhood by Arafat himself, before he strikes at the heart of a major European city. There was, in fact, such a boy, Black September’s Ali Hassan Salameh, architect of the Munich Olympics massacre, who was killed in Beirut by Israeli intelligence in 1979.

Silva knew exactly where he would set his thrillers: “I’ve always been interested in the birth of Israel and the Arab-Israeli wars and the history of the Holocaust and watching these two peoples in this terrible death struggle. It’s been a lifelong passion of mine,” he admits.

But he never envisioned Allon as a series character when he introduced him in The Kill Artist (2000). In fact, when his publisher (Putnam) suggested the idea, he tried to talk them out of it.

“I said, that’s crazy, I can’t make him into a continuing character, the world is so anti-Israel, no one wants to read about this Israeli continuing character. Come on, it’s just not going to work. And they said, just write it.” Silva prefers the British spy school of Eric Ambler, Graham Greene and John Le CarrŽ. “I don’t really read contemporaries,” he admits. “When I read, I read the great dead.” And Allon reflects this: his character is deeply divided, left-brain, right-brain, passionate about restoring the beauty of art masters, dispassionate about the killing that needs to be done if his young homeland is to survive. Silva prefers the battle of intellects to the spilling of blood. Suffice to say, Allon and George Smiley would have much to chat about.

“Yes, throughout the series, he hasn’t killed a lot of people; a lot of it is more referred to. He doesn’t do a lot of blood work in these novels, by choice. I learned quickly that bang-bang and twisty thriller plots just aren’t enough; I needed to do more in order to keep myself satisfied as a writer.” After four straight Gabriel Allon novels, Silva admits it’s time for a vacation from his art restorer. “I could use a little break from him,” he says. “I would like to explore some other sorts of material. I have a lot of respect for the character and the characters around him, particularly [master spy] Ari Shamron, and I’m reluctant to let it just go on and on and run the risk of the character becoming stale. My intention is to take a break for a book or two and then see what happens.” Working within the context of a young nation like Israel has forced Silva to reach some hard personal conclusions about the ongoing conflict. Did bringing Arafat into his fiction present difficulties? “Yes. Had Yasir Arafat accepted the deal that was offered to him at Camp David, this book would never have been written. I had to look hard at the evidence and spent a lot of time thinking about it, and I came to the conclusion that Yasir Arafat in word and deed and in the way he gave money to families who produced suicide bombers and the way he used the state media of the Palestinian authority had a direct hand in terrorism against Israel during the quote-unquote peace process, and that he viewed the peace process as part of the phased strategy of destroying the state of Israel. That is my personal conclusion, that he was not serious about reaching a peace settlement with the Israelis.” In Silva’s view, the Middle East struggle may be “a problem without a solution.” This melancholy assessment permeates Prince of Fire. But the author has no doubts about the bloody legacy of Yasir Arafat.

“I personally believe that Yasir Arafat and his terrorist organization, Black September, showed the bin Ladens of the world the way. These guys were the ones who perfected the high-profile international spectacular like Munich and the airline hijackings and all the rest. I’m afraid this is Yasir Arafat’s legacy: he and his guys were fantastic terrorists.” Jay MacDonald writes from Mississippi.

Andrew Vachss believes there are two versions of the truth in America: what people believe, and what really happened. If you are comfortable with the mainstream version of post-World War II American history, which would have us believe that such tragic events as the murder of Emmett Till and the assassination of John F. Kennedy were the isolated acts of madmen, you may not feel the need for further enlightenment. But if, like Vachss, you’ve experienced a growing suspicion that you have been, and continue to be, spoon-fed a version of the truth fashioned by powerful unseen forces, you’ve probably wondered: is it just me, or is something not quite right here? If you know Vachss (his name rhymes with fax) from his gritty mystery series featuring the enigmatic Zen avenger Burke (Flood, Shella, Down Here, etc.), you know he’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. As a former federal investigator, social services caseworker, director of a maximum-security prison for young offenders and labor organizer, the 62-year-old lawyer has dedicated his life to protecting the powerless, particularly minorities, migrant workers and young people, from the powerful, particularly sexual predators and brain-dead bureaucracies.

In his new novel Two Trains Running, Vachss takes a break from Burke to re-imagine a two-week period in the pivitol year 1959, when, in his estimation, America headed down the wrong track. This isn’t the textbook version of what went down; instead, it’s filled with the kind of speculative alternatives that your uncles may have pondered over beverages on the back porch. It took years to write and a lifetime to wonder about: I’m not saying I have all the answers, Vachss admits by phone from his home in Manhattan, but through my life experiences, I have a lot of questions. The setting: Locke City, a fictional Midwestern mill town under the thumb of longtime boss Royal Beaumont and his gang of mountain men. The times are a-changin’ most disagreeably for old Roy: his hegemony is threatened on all sides by rival Irish and Italian mobs, youth gangs and neo-Nazis preparing for the coming race war. To defend his fiefdom, Beaumont summons Walker Dett, a chillingly efficient killer for hire whose presence in town threatens to ignite a bloodbath of epic proportions.

The historical setting was no accident. I think 1959 was the fulcrum on which everything turned. It was the first time that an election (Kennedy over Nixon) was actually hand delivered. People who were liberals and Democrats kind of wink-wink at that because their guy won, but that’s not the way to do it. It was just as we were leaving the glory days of Eisenhower, just as we were approaching Vietnam and the civil rights explosions, just as England was divesting itself of its empire. I knew this was the fulcrum. The aptly titled Two Trains Running enables Vachss to explore the many dichotomies in America, particularly families (clans, interest groups, security agencies, etc.) that continue to undermine our personal freedoms. Any similarity to the present is strictly intentional. You have a clannishness where obedience to the clan is the highest value, Vachss says. There are people now where, literally, if you question something, you’re told that’s treasonous or that’s disloyal which is antithetical to Americanism, which is all about questioning authority and holding authority accountable. Certain historical mysteries still vex Vachss. Did the FBI foment racial unrest for its own purposes in the 1950s and ’60s? Did the government intentionally spare Al Capone in order to avoid further mythologizing him? Was John Dillinger’s death faked? Did the two men who murdered Emmett Till act alone? If you look around in the headlines over the last year, look at how many cases from that era are all of a sudden being reopened: Emmett Till; Schwerner, Cheney and Goodman; there was a civil rights murder in Tallahassee, Florida, that’s been reopened; there’s one outside of Atlanta. What I really want to do with the book so badly is to have people take another look a harder look rather than just accept what they’ve been told. Vachss found an ingenious technique to embed his suspicions right into the narrative by breaking the book into bite-size chapters, each with a date and military time code. Gradually, the reader comes to wonder who is keeping these detailed logs and why.

The standard third-person narrator wouldn’t work because that narrator is omniscient; that narrator just knows too much. I needed a technique where the reader could actually be the surveyor of what was going on and by listening and watching, learn as opposed to tuning in to someone’s thoughts, he says.

As its title implies, Two Trains Running operates on two separate tracks: I wrote a real fast mover so you can pick this up and read it like a movie and it flies by real quick, lots of action, lots of intrigue. But there’s an undercurrent that it’s my goal to get you to look at. If I succeeded, it’s a book that people will read more than once. The setting may be pre-Starbucks and cell phones, but the commentary is aimed at the state of the nation today. Despite his righteous anger, could Vachss actually be an optimist? You know what? I actually am. But it’s the long-term optimism of someone who says three, four generations from now we might be OK. It’s not like I’m optimistic for the immediate future. Clearly, unless something is done, the Supreme Court is going to shift. Clearly, if that’s done, personal freedoms are going to erode while religious peculiarities are going to be exalted. That’s a frightening thought. We’re like this old horse that knows the way home but it’s not in a hurry. We’re going to get there but boy, it’s not a straight line. Jay MacDonald is a writer in Oxford, Mississippi.