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.

That the name Jesse Kellerman should suddenly appear on mystery bookshelves seems unsurprising if not preordained. As the sole son and eldest of four children of best-selling novelists Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, 27-year-old Jesse has the pedigree, the academic credentials (B.S. from Harvard, M.F.A. from Brandeis) and the winning combination of self-confidence and self-deprecating humor not only to create memorable fiction in his own right, but also to handle with ease the lofty expectations that come from being one of "those" Kellermans.

"I’ve been fielding that question since I was five," he chuckles by phone from the Manhattan home he shares with wife Gabriella, a third-year medical student at Mount Sinai Hospital. "It’s going to take some time for me to establish who I am. This is something I realized a long, long time ago as unavoidable. I can either accept that this is my birthright or not, but to not accept it is kind of raging against the dying of the light."

Jesse’s mystery debut, Sunstroke, is a quirky noir tale in the Jim Thompson tradition about Gloria Mendez, a middle-aged Los Angeles secretary who has grown dependent over the years on her secret unrequited love for her older boss, Carl, a congenial if clueless toy importer. When Carl fails to return from one of his usual Mexican vacations (authorities claim he died in a fiery car crash), Gloria reluctantly heads south to retrieve his body. In the process, she encounters a handsome young Mexican claiming to be Carl’s son who offers a dramatically different version of her boss’ life. The more she learns about his secret past, the less she trusts Carl, his son or the official version of his death.

While Kellerman adheres to most noir conventions, his kinetic narrative voice separates Sunstroke from the pack. His omniscient storyteller is a sardonic, wisecracking mischief-maker whose droll asides lend real snap and menace to the proceedings, giving the book a playfulness similar to The Usual Suspects or Pulp Fiction.

"To me, drama without comedy is just dead and soulless, and comedy without any sense of gravitas is just idiotic," he says. "So when I’m writing more serious stuff, the way I avoid melodrama is by making sure that my sense of humor comes through."

One might expect the natural heir to the Kellerman franchise to be an avid mystery fan, right? Not quite. Though he admires a handful of mystery writers ("My parents, Elmore Leonard, Ruth Rendell, Jim Thompson"), he rarely reads crime fiction. Instead, Jesse aspires to become that rarest of rare birds, a popular literary writer in the vein of his top five: Vladimir Nabokov, David Mamet, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and John Fowles. In fact, writing crime fiction was not Plan A or even Plan B. He entered Harvard as a film and photography major, then switched to psychology, his father’s discipline, to broaden his experience.

"It’s very important to know other things besides what you write about, otherwise you don’t have anything to say," he says. "We’re living in a solipsistic age, an age of specialization, and making an effort to learn things outside yourself is fast disappearing. It’s hard to get people to listen to and think about things that are not in their immediate environment. That’s scary, to me anyway. The great thing about psychology is that it has something to say about everything, especially the arts. You learn a little bit of everything in that field."

His sophomore year, he waded into playwriting. Although Harvard does not have a theater department per se, its affiliation with the American Repertory Theater proved fruitful; Kellerman won the 2003 Princess Grace Award as the country’s most promising playwright and had his plays produced throughout the United States and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Unfortunately, he also discovered a limitation of the stage: "You can’t make a career in it. It’s really sad to say but nobody makes a living as a playwright," he says.

Novels seemed like a natural next step. After attempting a grand historical novel set 100 years ago in his native Los Angeles (short version: 21 encouraging rejections), Jesse decided to flesh out a true story that his mother-in-law once told him from her days as a lawyer in the Bay Area.

"The message that gets hammered over and over into budding playwrights is structure and story construction and how to unfold things sequentially. That’s actually why I decided to do this as a crime novel, because crime novels have a built-in beginning and end, mystery and solution. It was for the sake of keeping me on track," he says. Whether Jesse will develop a mystery series similar to his mother’s 15-book Pete Decker/Rina Lazarus series or his father’s 19-book Alex Delaware series remains to be seen.

"I’m really resistant to attempts to categorize myself," he says. "I find so many kinds of books interesting, and for that reason, at age 27, I’m not willing to say, here’s what I’m going to do for 50 years. Doesn’t the average American change careers like 12 times or something over their life? This is the great century of indecision, and I at least reserve the right to change genres a couple times. I fully intend to explore other arenas, much to the consternation of everybody in publishing. The writers that I admire tend to be the people who defy categorization."

Whatever course his muse may take him, Jesse is certain that family revelry, not rivalry, will follow.

"I feel like what’s going to happen—and I’m prepared for it—is that there will inevitably be comparisons either in one direction or another: in genetic degradation, Kellerman fails to live up to his parents, or, as I’m sure my parents are waiting to hear, Kellerman surpasses his parents! We’re just laughing about it. They’re certainly not threatened by me. And if I were threatened by them, I would have been a lawyer."

Jay MacDonald writes from Oxford, Mississippi.

Alan Furst admits he's "not entirely clear" on how he came to be the pre-eminent American writer of World War II spy novels. Beginning with Night Soldiers in 1988, the former journalist has written nine critically acclaimed espionage novels, including his latest, The Foreign Correspondent.

As the grandson of Jewish immigrants growing up in Manhattan, the only spy novels Furst read were by Eric Ambler and Ian Fleming, escapist fare with little grounding in reality. Then, on a 1983 travel story assignment for Esquire, he visited the Soviet Union, his ancestral home, for the first time.

" It was an enormous epiphany for me," Furst says by phone from his apartment in Paris. "I was back where I'd come from and there wasn't any question about that." Furst was frustrated that the Russians dictated when and where he could travel, all with the goal of converting his American dollars into rubles. "I had no desire to go to Moscow; the Russians made you go. If you wanted to go to the Danube, they wouldn't let you go there. My whole life turned on them being such jerks about it.

The intrigue of finding himself in a police state lingered long after that trip; it lingers today, in fact.

" It really hit me like a wind and it wasn't subtle at all," he says. "During World War II, everyone, in Europe at least, thought this might be it, that this was about as much life as they were going to have, and that changes things, especially romantic relationships. And it's right now, immediate, like maybe I'm not going to be here Thursday.

It is Furst's foremost intention, and his greatest gift, to so snugly settle us into the shoes of his characters that we get night sweats waiting for the knock of leather-gloved hands on the door.

In his compact, atmospheric new novel The Foreign Correspondent, Furst embeds us into the web of intrigue that surrounds Carlo Weisz, who, like thousands of Italian journalists, lawyers and intellectuals, fled Mussolini's Italy in 1938 and established a beachfront of the Italian resistance in Paris. When Mussolini's secret police murder the editor of the resistance's underground newspaper Liberazione, Weisz is chosen to replace him. But his covert duties become increasingly hazardous when his day job with Reuters takes him to Berlin during the Nazi ramp-up for war. There, he rekindles a love affair with an old flame whose anti-Nazi friends have volatile information that could burn both the monstrous Mussolini and the Italy Weisz hopes to preserve.

There is a lovely, chilling scene early on when Weisz meets with the unctuous Dr. Martz, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, over coffee and babka. A jovial glad-hander who once portrayed European buffoons in Hollywood movies, Martz assures Weisz that all the Nazis want from the media is "fair play," especially regarding recent assaults by those unreasonable Poles on innocent, peace-loving Germans.

"[Martz] says, 'Look, we're just asking that our story be told honorably. We have that right, don't we?'" Furst explains. "S—, man, it's the Nazis! But Weisz has to sit for a moment and think, how can I deny this guy what he's asking me? It's very hard to do that because you're raised to believe that it's honorable to give people a chance to speak and present their case and try to be fair."

"When I write these books, the question is always being asked: What would you do [in that situation]?" Furst admits. "Think about all the pressure—pressure from people you know and respect and who like you—and now you have to perform. You don't have to do it; you could say oh, this is too dangerous, I don't want to get involved. But I don't think Weisz was able to say that."

As with Furst's previous spy novels, The Foreign Correspondent examines a slice of European history between 1922 and 1945 from the perspective of a particular vocation that had an impact on WWII.

"I write about vocations, and always have. It frustrates me sometimes in novels where you have a character and you don't find out anything about going to work because, for all of us, a lot of the day is how we're going to make money to pay for this human life," Furst says.

Surprisingly, though, "I've never, ever written about a professional spy as hero," Furst says. " I don't know that I could do it realistically enough. [John] Le Carré, who is experienced, was able to do it brilliantly."

In contrast to his epic earlier works, The Foreign Correspondent is a sprint; short, fast and executed with the elegance of a pro writing at his peak.

"I started life trying to write huge, panoramic, fat books for people to take on long, long airplane rides. Now I want to write more concentrated stuff with narrower walls," he says. "I became extremely interested in what has been called the European existential novel, which is always short, always about one person, and about one sequence of events concentrated over a period of a few months. I like all that kind of thing, all those timeframes and all the ways that books work in that way."

Furst says living in Europe for more than two decades has been seminal to his spycraft.

"It more than contributes; it's central. We have this apartment on a little narrow street where d'Artagnan supposedly lived at one time, and at night everybody closes their shutters. I was just turning the lights off and some man or woman walked up the street and what I heard were footsteps on cobblestones. You never would hear that in America. It wasn't so much that it was filled with intrigue but there was something about it that was so 60 or 70 years ago as it echoed up off the sides of the buildings. That goes on every day and every night here for me in different ways."

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Oxford, Mississippi.

This is something all Southern writers know: Truth makes the best fiction (and not infrequently, vice versa). With more than 50 million copies of his books in print, and seven screenplays, including the Clint Eastwood/Gene Hackman film Absolute Power, under his belt, Virginia-born novelist and screenwriter David Baldacci is no exception. He still looks like a Richmond kid, prone to khakis and loafers and collared shirts, and his office in the Washington suburbs recalls a Virginia gentleman's library, complete with leather couch and armchairs—except that nearby building signs read Northrop Grumman and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

Perhaps that's part of the reason that the details of Baldacci's political thrillers, featuring agents of the FBI, CIA, DEA, Secret Service and so on, are so accurate that increasingly higher-up officials are willing to talk to him. His novels based on true crimes, like the Bill Clinton favorite Simple Truth, have a human impetus more moving than mere righteous indignation.

Even when his plots are not inspired by real events, the procedures, the prejudices, the in-fighting and the more literal hand-to-hand fighting are meticulously researched and reported. And when Baldacci can throw in a famous puzzle, a musical code, a prison-camp escape tunnel and a real-life secret government installation, not to mention a childhood trauma or two, he has a story recipe that's hard to top.

This year, however, Baldacci will try to top himself. Instead of coming out with his annual fall thriller, he's publishing two—Simple Genius, the third adventure of former Secret Service agents-turned-private eyes Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, and Stone Cold, a follow-up to 2005's Camel Club. He is also re-releasing the most Southern novel in his repertory, and the book closest to his heart: Wish You Well, a semi-autobiographical reflection on his family history. Simple Genius and Wish You Well are out this month; Stone Cold, already into second draft, will be published in the fall.

Baldacci has always been a writer, or at least a talker, which is how all storytellers start. He says he talked so much as a kid that finally, when he was eight or nine years old, "my mother got me a book with blank pages to write on, mostly to keep me quiet." But, like most Southern-bred writers, Baldacci originally set out to write short stories. "It's the characters," he says, citing the quality of the characters in what might be called the Southern canon: To Kill a Mockingbird, Walker Percy's Lancelot, the stories of Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty and Truman Capote. "I really loved them. I still prefer my books to be people-driven rather than plot-driven."

As it transpired, Baldacci was better suited to clarity than simile. He was writing briefs (after graduating from the University of Virginia Law School, he worked as a litigator in a prominent Washington firm) and trying to write short stories at night, when he gradually realized he had a stronger narrative drive.

"I like economy in language; it makes it stronger," Baldacci says. "There's much to be said for narrative flow—saying something decisive in a paragraph instead of two pages. I love to edit; if I can find a section of a [para]graph that's not necessary, I'm delighted." Having said that, he wryly admits that the experience of turning in a screenplay and having the director "challenge every word" can really "focus one's attention."

He works out much of the story in his head before writing the first draft on a computer, and then edits in longhand. He keeps notebooks with details and "backstories," but although he generally has a character's future, and past, sketched out, things occasionally take an unexpected turn. "Spontaneity is not a bad thing," he says. "You shouldn't be afraid to go off the road, because if you surprise yourself, you'll surprise the reader."

Simple Genius involves ciphers, computers, childhood traumas and the CIA, among other elements. Woven through the evolving relationship between King and Maxwell are forays into classical codes and Internet encryption (factual), Virginia colonial history (slightly fictionalized) and modern-day government operations at Camp Peary, a CIA "farm" on the York River. While the story and characters that Baldacci places at the installation are entirely fictional, the camp itself is not, although "if you call the CIA and ask them about Camp Peary, they don't admit that it exists."

To research it, Baldacci went along the river as close to the station as he could, and talked to locals who have lived with its various agencies (it started out as a Navy base) all their lives. One of the most chilling sentences in the book has to do with the unidentified jets that land there: A small-town newspaper editor tells King and Maxwell, "I knew something was up before Gulf One and Afghanistan and Iraq started because that damn runway at Peary looked like Chicago's O'Hare what with all the traffic going in." That's precisely what a local resident told Baldacci—a quote not only stranger but stronger than fiction.

Baldacci's villains are not the only ones playing games. His books are filled with literary allusions, historical "borrowings," name games, etc. Simple Genius includes a reprint of the famous Beale Cypher, only one page of which has ever been deciphered—using the Declaration of Independence as the key—and which allegedly leads to a vast treasure buried in Tidewater Virginia. (Baldacci, whose family owns a country place in Bedford County, says he grew up with treasure hunters digging holes all around the area.) And the new edition of Wish You Well has an appendix encouraging readers to begin to track their own family histories.

Baldacci has another quintessential trait of the Southern writer: As a man who loves to read, he wants others to love reading, and most of the programs funded by his Wish You Well Foundation are literacy campaigns. He's concerned about a general disappearance of literacy tools—not only reading, but writing, which is the gateway to creativity. "I think it's great that the SATs finally include an essay, but did you realize that 80 percent of students wrote their essays in block letters?

They don't even teach writing in schools anymore." Among the programs Baldacci has created is "Feeding Body and Mind," which partners with America's Second Harvest food banks to provide used or new books along with the meals. So far, they have distributed more than 40,000 volumes. If you're interested in contributing, you can find out more at davidbaldacci.com, which also lists Baldacci's reading schedule.

There is absolutely nothing about Chelsea Cain to remotely suggest that she had the year’s scariest novel inside her. The daughter of hippies who spent her formative years in an Iowa commune, Cain’s published work to date consists of an arch Nancy Drew parody (Confessions of a Teen Sleuth), a hippie-child anthology (Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture), a memoir of a road trip with her dying mother (Dharma Girl), a folk art how-to (Hippie Handbook) and a send-up of self-help for superheroes (Does This Cape Make Me Look Fat?). At 35, Cain is a seemingly well-adjusted Portland, Oregon, wife and new mother whose humorous weekly column in the Oregonian shows nary a hint of the chill factor behind her blue eyes.

How did a peace-and-love child come to unleash the full-on, visceral assault to be found in her new thriller, Heartsick?

Nightmares, gentle reader, nightmares.

But before we explore Cain’s psyche, you need to meet Gretchen Lowell, who, should this series take off as expected, may one day join Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter in our collective anxiety closet.

As Heartsick opens, the lovely Gretchen is strategically pounding nails into the chest of wide-awake-but-chemically-immobilized Portland Police Detective Archie Sheridan, whose task force has been on the trail of a serial killer for the past decade. He never expected his search would lead to the beautiful blond psychologist who only recently volunteered her services to the cause, only to abduct him. Then again, Gretchen is full of surprises, mostly of the excruciatingly painful sort. During their intimate week together, she uses a variety of tools to probe Archie’s pain threshold, ultimately bringing him to the brink of death before calling 911, saving his life but forfeiting her freedom. Someone please pull this girl’s Home Depot card!

Flash forward two years. The ordeal has left Archie a shell of a man with a raging Vicodin habit who visits Gretchen in prison weekly to learn the burial sites of her 200-plus victims. Only Archie knows the real reason for his visits: He can’t quit her. When teenage girls start disappearing, Archie and the task force are called in to hunt down the newly dubbed After-School Killer. The Portland Herald assigns pink-haired punk reporter Susan Ward to shadow Archie for a behind-the-scenes series. As the search continues, Susan’s own secret past places her in the killer’s path, and Archie, sensing a certain Gretchen-ness in the latest carnage, makes the kind of bone-chilling discovery that will have readers sleeping with the lights on.

Despite a quirky pace and a tendency to press the plausible, Heartsick may be the scariest psycho killer ride since Silence of the Lambs. The squeamish should definitely look elsewhere (perhaps a nice how-to book).

As a pre-teen growing up in Bellingham, Washington, Cain was terrified by news accounts of West Coast psycho killers. "We had Ted Bundy, the Hillside Strangler, the Green River Killer—it seemed like there were serial killers everywhere as a kid," she recalls.

Years later, Cain was pregnant with her first child and overindulging on rainy BBC America mysteries when she channel-surfed upon a Larry King segment with members of the Green River task force. She recognized the guests from newspaper accounts she’d read as a kid, and was fascinated by footage of them interacting with confessed Green River Killer Gary Ridgway.

"They would go on these weird field trips together, looking for bodies of his victims, and they had this very congenial relationship with him. They just seemed like friends; they had known him for so long because he had been a suspect for much of the life of the case," she says.

With prenatal time on her hands ("I couldn’t drink," she quips), Cain decided to explore her darkest fears as a child, and perhaps her fears for her daughter as well.

" Didn’t Mary Shelley write Frankenstein when she was pregnant?" she asks. "Maybe there is something to that, a fascination with death and life. Pregnancy is violent; in a way, it’s its own little torture. Maybe that’s where the fascination with the body in Heartsick comes from."

As luck would have it, Cain had recently joined a weekly writing workshop hosted by an author friend who is no stranger to graphic detail: Chuck Palahniuk. Did the best-selling author of Fight Club, Haunted and Rant help crank up the gore quotient of Heartsick?

"Oh, hugely," Cain admits. "Chuck is a big proponent of unpacking—really anything, but especially anything that’s visceral. I remember reading a passage aloud where they find the first girl’s body on the beach and Chuck was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, I want to see what that girl looks like.’ And there’s something important in that, to understand the violence of that."

Choosing a female serial killer vastly opened up the psychological possibilities of the series—watch for Sweetheart and Heartbreaker in the next two years.

"That automatically added this sexual tension on top of it," Cain admits. "When women kill, we always want an explanation. We usually want to blame it on a boyfriend or a husband or a father; there’s got to be a guy in her past that screwed her up enough. But when men kill, we don’t necessarily feel this need to explain it. Women generally kill their babies or they kill their family members and they use poison or suffocation. It’s very quiet, it’s premeditated and it’s very different from the way men kill. I was interested in exploring a woman who kills like a man."

Though Cain admits she’s "a little nervous" about attracting an unstable fan or two with her graphic content, she defends her decision to "unpack" her childhood baggage.

" I don’t think it’s gratuitous. I think it’s a violent book, but in order to understand Archie and Gretchen’s relationship, which drives the whole narrative, you have to understand what he went through. Society is filled with violence. To point at a book and start crying about how that is where the problem is, that’s pretty naïve."

Jay MacDonald always wears his safety goggles when operating machinery.