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.

David Baldacci's new book, The Whole Truth, boasts everything that has landed his last 14 thrillers on national bestseller lists: the compelling villains, the fearless hero, the suspense and all those delicious twists. In other words—it's a really fun read. But Baldacci hopes readers will get more out of it than just a good time. "Maybe with this book, people will sit up and say, 'Gee that could happen. And we need to make sure that it doesn't happen,'" he says.

The Whole Truth is about the Big Lie, and how the Internet has made it possible for disinformation to sound so convincing and to spread so fast that facts become irrelevant. "It's ironic. I think we have less truth today than we had 50 yeas ago," he says, adding, "You can go into a chat room and throw out percentages and figures and they can be a total lie, but people believe them." In Baldacci's new book, Nicholas Creel, the head of the world's largest defense contractor, hires a "perception management" company—the so-called PMers don't just spin facts, they make stuff up—to re-ignite Cold War fears about the Red Menace, driving nations toward the edge of WWIII. It's no coincidence that the plot calls to mind recent concerns about real-life Russian President Vladimir Putin. While PMers trade in lies, "Their targets are picked really well; it's easy to have a negative view of Russia," says Baldacci.

The disinformation campaign that propels The Whole Truth begins with the release of a grainy amateur video showing a Russian man recounting the horrors that he and his countrymen are suffering at the hands of the Secret Russian Federation police. Never mind that the man is an actor. The whole world buys the lie—and nations buy trillions of dollars worth of Creel's weapons. The scenario is not far-fetched, insists Baldacci, who says he got the idea for the book by talking to real people in the perception management business. Since publishing his blockbuster debut novel, Absolute Power, 12 years ago, the author has prided himself on having sources that lend his stories of government corruption and military intrigue authenticity. The 47-year-old Virginia native, who spent nine years as a lawyer in Washington, D.C., before giving up law to write full time, works out of an office in Northern Virginia where his neighbors include the Department of Homeland Security, defense giant Lockheed Martin and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Could the company he keeps be making him paranoid? "I keep my shades drawn and I never say anything over the phone I wouldn't want others to know," Baldacci says. He's chuckling, but it's hard to tell if he's entirely joking. "I don't know if I am or not," he admits.

In The Whole Truth, Shaw, a guy for whom beating up thugs and terrorists is all in a day's work, fights to reveal the truth. But in real life, brains, not brawn, may the best defense against the Big Lie. Disinformation won't be as effective, Baldacci says, if people start reading widely and reaching their own—well-informed—conclusions. "I want people to be curious again. I get tired of listening to people whose opinions are verbatim what they hear on Rush Limbaugh or what they hear on 'The Daily Show,'" he says. Baldacci is doing more than just complaining about the decline in reading. In 1999 he founded the Wish You Well Foundation to support literacy programs. Two years ago the foundation partnered with the hunger-relief organization America's Second Harvest to establish the Feeding Body and Mind (feedingbodyandmind.com) initiative. When Baldacci makes a store appearance, readers bring books to donate, which are then taken to local food banks and distributed to poor families. He's planning to recruit other authors into the program when he speaks in July at Thrillerfest in New York, where the International Thriller Writers Association is giving him its Silver Bullet Award. In the meantime, Baldacci is already well into his next book, a Camel Club thriller that picks up where Oliver Stone's story left off in Stone Cold. The as-yet-untitled book is due out in November.

He's also closely watching the presidential race. Baldacci, who describes himself as an independent, worries the public excitement generated by the candidates won't last once the contest is over. "It's easy to listen to a speech for 10 minutes," he says. "But come January, when we have a new president and the really hard decisions are being made, I'm afraid our citizens are going to check out again."

Leo Demidov's personal hell has truly been paved with the best of intentions. The Soviet war hero and rising star within Stalin's State Security force has ordered the execution of thousands of his countrymen, or worse, dispatched them to the infamous gulags, all in service to the greater good of communism. But when he obediently dismisses the brutal 1953 murder and evisceration of a colleague's young son as nothing more than an accident, the narrow path of lies on which his career is founded suddenly veers into a nightmarish landscape of his own worst fears. The child is, in fact, a victim of an evil the Soviet state has never seen before: a serial killer.

Welcome to Child 44, a grisly and gripping redemption tale constructed by 28-year-old British newcomer Tom Rob Smith that puts the screws to your personal sense of morality. Would you betray your spouse to save yourself or your parents? Could you conduct torture, or endure it? Could you execute your own sibling? These are just a few of the dark choices Leo must face in this bone-chilling, frostbitten thriller.

"It's easy in most of today's societies to be a good person because, fundamentally, the societies are good; we're liberal, we're tolerant, we're about people achieving what they want to achieve in a sweeping sense," Smith says. "But when your society is asking these terrible things of you, how easy is it to buck it? How easy is it to shrug that off, and how easy do you get caught up in that?"

Initially at least, readers may be more repulsed by than attracted to Leo. He is, after all, a state-employed grim reaper whose parents and wife Raisa live comfortably because of the terrible things he does to real and rumored dissidents alike. But when Vasili, Leo's scheming subordinate, plants doubts about Leo within the paranoid hierarchy, Leo and Raisa find themselves exiled to the boondocks.

That's where Leo begins putting together the missing-children puzzle pieces, an unauthorized activity that unintentionally results in a one-way trip to the gulags for some 200 suspected homosexuals. It also makes Leo and Raisa fugitives from Vasili, now Leo's superior, who seeks to crush the pair before they can expose crimes that have already been officially paid for by such convenient scapegoats as mental patients and gays.

"Leo is the kind of character you see in Conrad a lot, which is this idealism gone wrong," says Smith. "He is someone who is fundamentally a good person, but in the attempt to arrest someone who is genuinely guilty, he is then persecuted for it. It's an interesting flip for me, but then it's an interesting redemption for him."

Dark secrets from Leo's past lead to a surprising and satisfying conclusion. Smith is already hard at work on a sequel, The Secret Speech, which picks up Leo's story three years later when thousands of those whose lives Leo ruined are released from the gulags.

What prompted Smith to set a serial killer thriller within one of the world's most repressive regimes? History, actually. The London-based, Cambridge-educated television screenwriter and editor was working on a screen adaptation of "Somewhere the Shadow," a short story by U.K. science fiction writer Jeff Noon (Vurt; Pollen) when he happened upon the true-crime case of Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo.

"He was what were called 'pushers' whose job was basically to go and beg a factory to deliver whatever it had promised to deliver, because everyone was behind on these deliveries. So he had this job going up and down the country by rail, which enabled him to kill over a wide distance," he says.

Smith dove into researching the Soviet Union, reading everything from Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago to yes, even Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park.

"My first thought was that this would make a great movie, so I wrote a 12-page outline and pitched it to my film agent," says Smith. "He said, 'Well, it's Stalinist Russia, it's period, it's going to cost $80-$100 million to produce and there are only like three directors in the world who can get this off the ground. You're an unknown writer; you're shooting for the moon.' Instead, he suggested that I should write it as a book."

Smith credits Child 44's breathless pace to his screenwriting background. "In screenwriting, you think about set pieces a lot. Movie directors are very ruthless about making sure that things happen at the right point and that things are always happening; you can't have, say, 10 dull minutes. That's something that I took from screenwriting and applied to this."

That said, Smith loved the freedom of prose. "There are things in this book that I could never have done in a movie script," he admits. "One of the things I love about writing prose is that you can bring peripheral characters absolutely to the forefront of the action in two paragraphs and really explore them in a way that is very difficult to do in movies."

Although readers should brace themselves for a few uncomfortable scenes of violence and torture in Child 44, most of the horrors occur in our heads, not on the page, as Smith exposes the agonizing paranoia of the Stalinist era.

Objections to the book's violence "surprise me slightly, not in the sense that I thought it was going to be an easy read, but I'm not really interested in gore," he says. "It's like describing sex in a book; it's very difficult because it just becomes almost anatomical and slightly uninteresting. I'm interested in the emotional side of things."

About that expensive movie version: Child 44 has been optioned by one of those three green-light directors, Ridley Scott of Blade Runner, Alien and Gladiator fame. Will Smith be writing the screenplay? "

No. I spent two-and-a-half years playing on the strengths of this as a book. I didn't really feel like I was the person to then rediscover it as a movie. I thought, someone needs to come at this fresh."

Jay MacDonald writes from snow-free Austin.

People who know Teri Coyne’s work as a stand-up comedian are going to be very, very surprised by her intense, emotionally wrenching first novel, The Last Bridge. There are many good words that could describe Coyne’s story of 28-year-old Alex “Cat” Rucker, an alcoholic waitress who fled her rural childhood home as a teenager then returns to confront her family demons 10 years later, after her mother’s suicide. “Page-turner,” perhaps. Or “psychologically compelling.” But “funny”? Most definitely not.

“People ask, wow, where did that come from?” Coyne says with a characteristic laugh during a call to her home on Long Island’s North Fork. For some years Coyne managed a technical writing and training team at a New York law firm and divided her time between an apartment in Queens and the 110-year-old house she bought and renovated on Long Island, while performing and writing on the side. The favorable early buzz about her first book has not entirely freed her from needing a job, but she now works as a consultant and spends more time at her North Fork home composing an early draft of a second novel. “I am drawn to the darker side of humor,” Coyne says. “I was inspired and influenced by comedians like Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks. But when I performed, I certainly wasn’t intense and dark like this book.”

The Last Bridge developed from a kind of vision Coyne had after abandoning standup in order to tell a larger story than she could in her comedy routines. “The book started with an image in my head of a mother taping garbage bags to the wall, a shotgun and the opening line of the book: ‘Two days after my father had a massive stroke, my mother shot herself in the head.’ Once I heard that voice, I couldn’t stop. I wrote the opening line and it just started coming. Looking back, it started at a time in my life when I was exploring this concept of what makes a family, what makes a person a parent. Is it blood or is it choice? Are we the product of our experiences? Or are we the product of our choices? As I started to write this story, it became very clear that that was really what I was trying to explore.”

The exploration did not go entirely smoothly. “Clearly when it takes you 10 years to write a book, you’re not in a big hurry to get something out there,” Coyne says, laughing. “This was my first book. I was learning the process of writing a novel while I was working on it. My goal was not publication but rather to make it the best story I could make it. That meant spending a lot of time writing and rewriting and focusing on getting the tone right.”

Interestingly, Coyne says that she had to leave her house to write the most difficult parts of the book. “When I was working on something that was really, really emotional it was easier for me to just go sit in a public space because for some reason I’m not as distracted in a public space.”

Although she can’t listen to music while she writes, Coyne uses music to get into the writing. She developed playlists for each character she was working on. “Every character has a song and that song just puts me immediately into the head of that person,” she says. Her playlists are on iTunes and her website.

Coyne’s early struggles to learn her craft were not helped by the nature of her central character, Alex, otherwise known as Cat. “It’s very difficult to write a character that you know your reader is not going to like right away. Cat is not a very likeable person in the beginning. But I felt very protective of her. I had to find a way to keep readers with me until I could show who she really is. Anger is not a real emotion and Cat’s anger is a disguise for something deeper. I had to find a way to show what that anger is covering.”

Part of what Alex is covering—or running from—is an abusive relationship with her father. Coyne’s unnerving portrait of that relationship draws on research she did with victims of abuse and from her own family history.

“Cat is not me,” Coyne says, “and none of the characters are reflective of people or characters in my own life, but some of their qualities are composites. That said, I made them all up, so they really are me. I dedicate the book to my father. He had a drinking problem and he had abusive and violent behavior. I struggled with that, as did all the people in our family. There’s this very private thing that happens inside of the family and then there’s this public life you lead in school or outside of the family. You learn very early that your family situation is not something you share outside of your family.”

“I had a lot of friends who had siblings who were kind of the black sheep or developed drug problems or drinking problems,” Coyne recalls. “People thought these people were broken, that something was wrong with them, that they were weak, that they didn’t have any ambition. But the older that I got and the more that I talked to people and saw what really happens to people who come from abusive families, I saw that these are not weak people. These are people that are masquerading a tremendous amount of pain. As I started to learn more and understand more, I started to really see that we have these notions or conceptions about people who are troubled that often aren’t really honest about what that person is really going through. It’s very, very important for me to shed light on that.”

As a result of this passion for bringing light to a difficult subject, Coyne’s empathic and ultimately redemptive first novel has struck a chord with early readers in ways that have completely amazed her. “It has been a lifelong dream of mine to get a book sold and published,” she says. “It’s a phenomenal thing that has happened to me. But I have to say I am in total awe of the reading community. It has just really blown me away how passionate readers are and how they do go out of their way to make contact with me and how dedicated they are to getting the word out about The Last Bridge. It’s really impressive and inspiring.”

The feeling, it seems, is completely mutual.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

What if a secret society possessed indisputable proof that Christianity in general—and the Catholic Church in particular—are built on historical error? To what extremes might zealous defenders of the faith go to find and destroy such potentially catastrophic evidence? These are the premises that set Dan Brown's absorbing new novel, The Da Vinci Code, in motion and then send it pinballing through a labyrinth of intricate schemes, sidetracks and deceptions.

Threaded through the story are plot-related codes and cryptograms that impel the reader to brainstorm with the protagonists, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (introduced in Angels & Demons) and French police cryptologist Sophie Neveu. An after-hours murder at the Louvre swirls these two strangers into the middle of an ongoing combat between the Priory of Sion, a shadowy order that dates back to the Crusades, and Opus Dei, a relatively new bastion of Catholic conservatism.

"I first learned of [Leonardo] Da Vinci's affiliation with the Priory of Sion when I was studying art history at the University of Seville," Brown says in a telephone interview from his home in New Hampshire. "One day, the professor showed us a slide of The Last Supper and began to outline all the strange anomalies in the painting. My awareness of Opus Dei came through an entirely different route and much later in my life. After studying the Vatican to write Angels & Demons, I became interested in the secrecy of the Vatican and some of the unseen hierarchy. Through that, I also became interested in Opus Dei and met some of the people in it."

While the characters and storylines of The Da Vinci Code are manifestly his own contrivances, Brown stresses that all the contextual details about history, biography, location and art are true. "One of the aspects that I try very hard to incorporate in my books is that of learning," he says. "When you finish the book—like it or not—you've learned a ton. I had to do an enormous amount of research [for this book]. My wife is an art historian and a Da Vinci fanatic. So I had a leg up on a lot of this, but it involved numerous trips to Europe, study at the Louvre, some in-depth study about the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei and about the art of Da Vinci."

Weighty as it is, Brown's scholarship never slows down the sizzling action. Robert and Sophie stay on the run at a breathless pace as menacing characters pop up in their flight path like silhouettes in a shooting gallery. Unlike a conventional mystery, in which clues become clear only in hindsight, many of the clues here are presented as such: a dying murder victim who arranges his body a particular way, a slip of paper with a phrase scribbled on it that may be a light-shedding anagram, a line of seemingly random numbers.

"For some reason, I was a good math student," Brown says, explaining his involvement with codes and symbols. "And language came easily. Cryptology and symbology are really fusions of math and language. My father is a well-known mathematician. I grew up around codes and ciphers. In The Da Vinci Code, there's a flashback where Sophie recalls her grandfather creating this treasure hunt through the house for a birthday present. That's what my father did for us."

Beyond spinning a good yarn within a richly factual context, Brown admits to yet another aim. "I am fascinated with the gray area between right and wrong and good and evil. Every novel I've written so far has explored that gray area." He reveals that his next novel will deal with "the oldest and largest secret society on earth" and with "the secret history of our nation's capital."

Brown concedes that turning Christianity's most fiercely held beliefs into fictional fodder may spark some controversy. But he says it's a risk worth taking. "I worked very, very hard to make the book fair to all parties. Yes, it's explosive. I think there will be people for whom this book will be—well, 'offensive,' may be too strong a word. But it will probably raise some eyebrows."

What are your favorite holiday traditions?
Getting family together would be our tradition, since we’ve been successful at it ever since I can remember. I’m lucky because the people in my family, unlike a lot of others’, actually like spending time together. We don’t see each other enough.

What was the best holiday gift you received as a child?
Drums. They drove everybody crazy for a couple of years. Talk about thoughtful and sacrificing parents.

Did you have a favorite holiday book as a child?
When I was a kid, I was into the Babar books, and later, Treasure Island. Mike Mulligan, Ferdinand the Bull, and Curious George were great characters too. For holiday books, I’ve always loved A Christmas Carol and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

What are your favorite books to give as gifts?
The real issue is that parents and grandparents need to continue to give books as gifts. A lot of people gear up to give video games and movies, which is fine, I suppose, but we need to establish that every Christmas, they will get at least one book. And make sure it’s a book that each kid is really going to love.

What books are you planning to give as gifts this year?
I give different books every year. My son Jack is a huge fan of Percy Jackson, so that usually works well. And for adults this year, Michael Connelly’s Nine Dragons, Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War or John Grisham’s Ford County will be good to give.

What are you reading now?
The book of short stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower, and Philipp Meyer’s American Rust. Also an older book about Saturday Night Live called Live From New York.

What would you like to get from Santa this year?
Books, man, books! This is a mandate for everybody I know to choose the one book they loved this year and let me get in on the fun.

What are you most looking forward to during the holiday season?
I look forward to my family being together—they have started to scatter! So it's wonderful when we manage to be together. Our in-law families are all close and we have a great time with Secret Santa, stealing gifts from one another and having time to appreciate one another. We know that we're lucky and we try to help others out as well.

Why do books make the best gifts?
Books make incredible gifts—they can just about last forever! I think they're also thoughtful gifts. I know that my daughter-in-law, an incredible young artist, adores picture books but she doesn't always feel they fit into a newlywed budget. Buying her a book she's been wanting is a great pleasure. Especially this year—we've had some tough times. Books can be great friends at these times.

What are you planning to give to friends and family?
What am I planning to give? Well, naturally, lots of books. I do 10 stockings a year—books are a great way to stuff those stockings! I try to make my gifts fit the person, so my list will also include clothing, fishing gear, Disney tickets and more.

What was the best book you read this year?
One of my greatest pleasures was reading for an upcoming anthology for Mystery Writers of America. There were so many truly wonderful stories that honing down the numbers was almost impossible. The talent out there is boundless.

At the age of 62, Henning Mankell recently bought a pair of ice skates for the first time since he was a young boy growing up in northern Sweden. The occasion: a winter blizzard that virtually isolated his northern residence. The temporary loss of telephone service might concern others, but for Mankell, it was bliss to be suddenly transported back to the natural quietude of his youth.

In his latest mystery, The Man from Beijing, the best-selling author of Swedish crime fiction revisits his past in a different way. His heroine, Birgitta Roslin, is a college radical turned principled judge who finds herself swept up in worldwide intrigue. Mankell’s father had been a judge as well, in the tiny hamlet of Sveg. “It is the first time I have used a judge as a character in a book,” Mankell says by phone from Sweden.

The Man from Beijing represents another first—it’s also Mankell’s first hardcover release from Random House’s Knopf imprint, after a string of successful paperbacks featuring Swedish detective Kurt Wallander.

“Mankell has become an iconic brand for Vintage Crime/Black Lizard with paperback sales in excess of half a million copies,” says Paul Bogaards, Knopf’s executive director of publicity. “The Man from Beijing was actually the first hardcover on offer to us at Knopf. Of course, we immediately leapt at the chance to publish Mankell here.”

Mankell’s new suspense novel must have been especially appealing to Knopf after the blockbuster success of Stieg Larsson, the late Swedish crime writer whose Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.) has struck publishing gold in the U.S. But, as Bogaards notes, deconstructing the mania for Nordic crime fiction leads to a chicken-or-the-egg question about who launched the trend.

“I think it’s important to note that Mankell is very much a pioneer in the genre and that much of our fascination with Swedish crime fiction turns on his work,” Bogaards says. “Mankell preceded Larsson—indeed, he seeded interest for American readers—and Larsson’s success in the States and around the world is a tribute to Mankell’s iconic detective, Wallander.”

No matter who came first, it’s indisputable, as Bogaards notes, that Mankell “really is one of the best crime novelists at work today,” and this talent is on display in his new standalone suspense novel.

The Man from Beijing opens in January 2006 with a gruesome discovery: 19 residents of the remote Swedish village of Hesjovallen, most of them members of the Andren family, have been brutally and inexplicably massacred. Judge Roslin, whose mother grew up in the village, finds a diary kept by Jan Andren, an ancestor who describes his immigration to America and his role as a foreman during the construction of the transcontinental railway.

Cut to 1863. Three Chinese brothers, San, Wu and Guo Si, flee their village for America, only to be forced into virtual slavery to build that selfsame railway. Ultimately, San repatriates to China, where he marries and bears children, including a son who would become a leader of the Communist Party.

Back in Hesjovallen, Roslin finds a single red ribbon at the crime scene that leads her to suspect that the killer was a lone Chinese man who passed through town on that deadly night. When she follows her suspicions to Beijing, the tables turn as Roslin is tracked and detained as a person of interest by the Chinese. Her amateur investigation leads her to Hong, a committed Maoist who acts as her escort in Beijing, and ultimately to Hong’s brother Ya Ru, an ultra-wealthy developer with big plans for Africa.

Mankell has lived “one foot in snow, one foot in sand” since 1986, when he became director of Teatro Avenida in the Mozambican capital of Maputo. He traces the novel’s origin to a news story 10 years ago about Chinese construction foremen mistreating African workers while building a new Chinese-funded government building in Maputo.

“When I heard about that, I started to really reflect on the idea of China in Africa,” Mankell says. The Man from Beijing explores the irony that China, once the victim of colonialism, now seems intent on colonial expansion.

“China has one enormous domestic problem, and that is what to do with all of the hundreds of millions of peasants that they really do not use. I read just the other day that China has rented land in Kenya to move some one million peasants to Africa. What I try to say in this book is, we have to be very careful about what is happening in Africa. There is a risk that something bad is happening now.”

Mankell, who has written many of his Swedish-set novels, including most of the Wallander series, while residing in Mozambique, likes the perspective that Africa affords his fiction.

“I believe in distance,” he says. “As a painter stands very close as he’s painting, occasionally he steps backward to have a look and then he goes closer and continues to paint. I believe this distance I have to Europe has made me a better European in a way. When you stand at a distance, you can see things more clearly than if you do not have that distance.”

He has watched with equal clarity the boom in Nordic mysteries, which extends beyond his work and the Larsson books to Karin Fossum’s award-winning The Indian Bride, Hakan Nesser’s Inspector Van Veeteren series and a host of others.

“You remember 30 years ago there was a Swedish tennis player named Bjorn Borg? We never had had a really good tennis player before that, but after him, there came a hell of a lot of really good tennis players: Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg, etc.,” Mankell says. “I believe that nothing succeeds like success.”

Mankell’s publisher is betting he’s right on target with that assessment and plans to ride the wave as long as it lasts. A second Knopf hardcover, The Troubled Man, is already in the works, says Bogaards, who predicts significant readership gains for Mankell as the fascination with Nordic noir continues.

Jay MacDonald writes from snow-free Florida.

RELATED CONTENT
Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy
Karin Fossum’s Black Seconds
Henning Mankell’s The Man Who Smiled

Although Presumed Innocent was a blockbuster bestseller, it took you 23 years to publish a follow-up. Did you always intend to write a sequel to tie up loose ends?
To be honest, I thought for many years that I never would write a sequel. I always thought self-imitation is an inherently limiting thing for a writer, and I was afraid of trying to equal a book whose success at the time depended in part on breaking new ground. [But] at this stage, I was no longer worried about constraining myself. And by now, enough time has passed that I thought many people would be curious about Rusty—starting first of all with me.

Some of the events in Innocent eerily echo Rusty’s experiences in Presumed Innocent. How do you approach these parallel circumstances but twist them so they are fresh and new?
Well, I think one of the deepest truths about life is that people are sometimes compelled for reasons they don’t understand to keep repeating the same mistakes. So I regarded the parallel circumstances as deeply revealing of the character, and full of a meaning that wasn’t as clearly there the first time around. All the characters in Innocent are informed by the experience of the first book, and are trying desperately, in a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes, not to step in the same river twice.

Often lawyers who become authors of legal thrillers have a difficult time developing a fluid writing style, but your writing has always been gripping and accessible. What is your secret?
I was a novelist before I was a lawyer, having been a creative writing fellow at Stanford before I headed to law school. As a result, I was not trying to “find” my narrative voice after my style had been shaped by legal writing. I see legal writing as a distinct and somewhat limited voice that I’ve mastered, but one that does not really interfere with the creative voice I’d found before.

Given that you are still a practicing lawyer, what drives you to write fiction that also deals with the law?
I always say that the great break of my literary career was going to law school—it was one of the most fortuitous decisions of my life. I was a lecturer in the English department at Stanford, and for me going to law school meant giving up a teaching career. But I realized I was passionate about the law and the questions it asks, about deciding right from wrong for an entire society, fashioning rules that are firm yet flexible enough to fit the multitude of human circumstances. Those questions continue to preoccupy me. The truth is that I became not only a much more successful writer when I started writing about the law, but also a much better one as well, because I was writing about things that gripped me to the core.

The law often relies on individuals interpreting laws and regulations as best they can. To what extent do you think your novels contain characters and actions that are subject to the interpretation of your readers?
Without subscribing too heartily to deconstructionism, there is a truth that every reader reads a book his or her own way. But art of all kinds also depends on creating universals; in the case of narrative, we seek to create a fully imagined individual, a character, to whose life readers have something of a universal reaction. There are great differences in nuance in terms of readers’ responses, but if there is not a common element, a book is probably not a success.