Describe your book in one sentence.
When he was 14, John Calvino killed the murderer of his parents and sisters, but 20 years later, as a homicide detective, he reluctantly comes to believe that the dead man's spirit has returned to murder John's wife and children.

What was your favorite book as a child?
Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. I identified intensely with Mr. Toad of Toad Hall. I still do.

What's the best writing advice you've ever gotten?
John D. MacDonald told me that most criticism a writer receives is about his style and his worldview, because the critics want you to write and think the way they do. A writer's unique style and worldview, he said, are the most important things any author has to sell and therefore he should diligently preserve them.

Have you ever been tempted to quit writing?
No. Writing talent is an unearned grace. I think it comes with an obligation to explore it and to polish the craft that supports it. I hope to die face-first in my keyboard—but only after I've written the last line of the book.

If you had to be stranded on a desert island with one fictional character, who would you want it to be?
Jeeves, the butler from the series of novels by P.G. Wodehouse. I wouldn't need a butler on a desert island, but if I'm going to be reduced to eating snakes and bugs to survive, I want to share the island with someone who can make me laugh.

What was the proudest moment of your career so far?
All the proudest moments are the same—those books of mine that delight my wife, Gerda. I trust her judgment. And just as I wrote love notes and poems to her when we were dating, I write each book primarily with the hope of enchanting her.

What are you working on now?
This interview. But as soon as I finish it, I'll return to a novel with the scariest premise I've ever had. I can't talk about it because I never talk about a book in progress. I learned a long time ago that talking about a book diminishes the desire to write it.

Name one book you think everyone should read (besides your own!).
Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez.

Where do you write?
Always in the same place—bed. And always in my pyjamas.

Arguably one of the best-known authors in the world, James Patterson shows no signs of slowing down. This spring, Patterson will release the latest two volumes in his wildly popular Women’s Murder Club series. The 9th Judgment is on sale in trade paperback in April, followed by 10th Anniversary, a new hardcover on sale in May. Taking the time to speak with BookPage, Patterson tells us where he finds his inspiration and what’s next for the ladies of the Women’s Murder Club.  

You hold the Guinness World Record for bestsellers, with 63 New York Times best-selling titles and counting! After so many years and so many books, how do you keep coming up with fresh and exciting ideas?
Yeah, I guess writer’s block has never been a problem for me. I suppose that I am addicted to telling stories. In fact, I’m always trying to come up with new scenarios and plots. I’m actually running a bit behind schedule—I have at least a dozen concepts I haven’t begun to outline yet.

The Women’s Murder Club series started in 2001 with the publication of 1st to Die. Where did you get your inspiration for the series?
It seemed to me it was high time there was a female detective hero who works in the way most women, refreshingly, do work—as a team. Thriller fiction is full of lone-dog male (and a few female) protagonists who don’t play nice with others. Lindsay and company took shape out of that realization that there are other ways to solve problems, and catch criminals. There’s nothing quite like the Women’s Murder Club elsewhere in detective or thriller fiction.

What do you think it is about the Women’s Murder Club series that has resonated so strongly with readers?
Probably part of it is the collaborative group dynamic. Also, I think Lindsay, Claire, Jill and Yuki are pretty cool people. And they’re definitely great friends—the kind we all want to have. The plot twists aren’t bad, either . . . of course, I suppose I might be a little biased.

Can you choose a favorite character from the Women’s Murder Club? Or is that like asking a parent to pick a favorite child?
You must have read one of my prior interviews. I’m a good author that way. As a parent, I have no problem picking my favorite child. His name’s Jack and he’s my one and only.

10th Anniversary, the 10th entry in the Women’s Murder Club series, goes on sale in May. What can you tell us about this book?

In The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes, Marcus Sakey has written a seriously good thriller. Really good. So of course we can’t tell you too much about it.

“It drives me crazy when people [he means reviewers] give away all the stuff I worked so hard to make surprises,” Sakey says during a call to his home in Chicago, where, he reports, “life is a little chaotic.” He and his wife g.g. just moved to new digs a mile and a half west of Wrigley Field two days before our call.

Chicago’s neighborhoods have been the setting for all four of Sakey’s previous novels, including the highly regarded The Blade Itself (2007) and Good People (2008), the film version of which will be produced by and star Tobey Maguire. It gives nothing away to say the new book is, therefore, a departure, opening in Maine and ending in Los Angeles, with a crazy sort of road trip in between. Nor will it deprive readers of the edge-of-the-seat, smack-to-the-forehead pleasures of every nasty twist and turn of the plot to let them know that the title character suffers from amnesia. When the man awakens to find himself lying naked on a desolate beach, he has no idea who he is or how he got there.

Sakey’s publishers are so happy with the new book that they are calling it “a breakthrough achievement.” Sakey himself sounds more circumspect. Despite the truly scary, brutal edges of some of the characters he imagines, Sakey seems like a good-humored guy you’d enjoy having a beer with. He says he likes calling into reading group discussions about his books. He admits to “pet peeves” rather than towering rages. One of his pet peeves, he says, is discourtesy. “I’m a big fan of courtesy. I think it’s basic human decency to be courteous to one another.”

So, is his latest thriller a breakthrough? “That’s a hard question to answer. I will say that I feel it’s my most ambitious book. And it was a monster to write. It’s the book I’ve thrown away the most of. I reached a point where I realized that what I was writing was kind of bleak and joyless. I wasn’t enjoying it and I didn’t think others would either. So I had to throw out probably 150 pages. Which is pretty much a call for martinis.”

One of the biggest challenges, Sakey says, was finding a way to make all the plot twists and thematic layers of his story work together. “I wanted to make them honest surprises, where each significant discovery Daniel makes takes the book in a different direction. . . . And—I hope this doesn’t sound pretentious; I don’t think I’m pretentious—I was really trying in the way I told the story to say something about memory and about what stories mean. I think memory is just a story we tell ourselves, and if that’s true, then our identity is always malleable. There’s no certainty in who we are; it’s just the choices we make.”

But themes and ideas, Sakey acknowledges, are a touchy subject when it comes to writing a thriller. “There’s this perception that, ‘oh, you’re a thriller writer,’ pat on the head. But if a book doesn’t have ideas, I don’t understand why you’d read the book, much less write it. Without that, it’s just run, run, chase, chase, shoot, shoot. That doesn’t give me anything to anchor to as a reader and certainly not as a writer.”

Sakey grounds his ideas and twisty plots in small, vivid details. “I’m a big fan of the pull-out detail that makes you feel it. I like the little bit of verisimilitude rather than two pages of explanation.” And that tendency extends to his scariest characters. “A lot of times when people try to make things scary, they go into this weird slasher-movie mode. Like the more ridiculous and bloody harm they can make a character do while laughing the better. I just don’t buy that. I get annoyed by authors who do that.”

Which prompts Sakey to talk about another of his pet peeves. “I’ll hear some authors say that they don’t read while they’re writing. I don’t understand. Because first of all I am writing all the time, so then when is it I’m allowed to read?”

Sakey says he reads widely in his genre—Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, Richard Price, to name a few—“but I probably read more outside the genre than within it. My tastes run to David Foster Wallace, David Mitchell, Thomas Pynchon, Michael Ondaatje, Michael Chabon, Michael Cunningham. It’s like somebody once said: There are two kinds of writing, good writing and bad writing. I don’t really care what the genre is, I read the good stuff.”

You can put Sakey’s The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes right up there with the good stuff.

Benjamin Black, the alter ego of Irish literary author John Banville, returns with A Death in Summer, his fourth detective novel featuring pathologist/amateur detective Garret Quirke.

You don’t hide the fact that Benjamin Black is a pseudonym. What does having a pen name afford a writer? How does having an alter ego affect your approach toward the crime series?
My decision to write crime fiction under a pseudonym arose out of the fear that if I published under Banville’s name, Banville’s readers would suspect I was working a postmodernist trick on them. I wanted readers to know this was a new venture I was embarked on, and that what they saw was what they got. BB writes entirely differently from JB—both in procedure and in the finished product. I haven’t yet decided what it means to have an alter ego. Nothing much, probably. We are all manifold selves, after all.

The book opens with the murder of a major newspaper tycoon, and his print empire looms over the rest of the story. You were an editor for The Irish Press; did that experience inform the book at all?
I think the only place where I consciously used my experience as a newspaper man was in a little scene early on in the book where a golf-playing news executive is dictating to his long-suffering secretary an editorial on the violent death of the newspaper’s proprietor. I enjoyed writing that.

While you’re clearly writing within the tradition of classic noir, your novels have a decidedly modern bent. What do you take from the genre and what do you make your own?
Have they a decidedly modern bent? They seem to me decidedly traditional, if perhaps a bit better-written than a lot of crime fiction. I like the genre, but on the other hand I dislike the notion of there being genres; to me, there are just good books and not so good books. Crime and Punishment is a crime novel, and The Postman Always Rings Twice is a piece of serious literature.

What kinds of liberties does writing about an “amateur” give you? Do you ever worry that your part-time sleuth is becoming a professional?
I wanted a protagonist who would be the direct opposite of a Sherlock Holmes or an Hercule Poirot, and certainly in Quirke that’s what I got. He’s just as slow and dull-witted as the rest of us are, and most of the time he gets things wrong, misses clues, falls over his own feet and will certainly never be a professional. Since the books are set in the 1950s it means I do not have to keep up with present-day forensic science and so on, which is a great relief, for I find the contemporary obsession with factuality a great bore. A pinch of imagination will tip the scales against a pound of research any day.

Why do you find the 1950s such an interesting time to write about?
The 1950s in Ireland was a horrible, soul-destroying, hidebound and mean-spirited time, but also absolutely fascinating, at this remove. Ireland was just like Eastern Europe, caught fast in the grip of an iron ideology and ruled over by half-crazed zealots who watched our every move to ensure we did not deviate from the party line. And then, life in Dublin in those days, as I vividly recall it, was pure noir: the fog, the furtive sexuality, the dirty secrets hidden deep. Banville gets quite jealous of BB, at times.

You’re particularly good at withholding information without leaving your readers feeling cheated. How do you decide which clues to reveal and when?
Will it dent your admiration if I say that, as in life, so in fiction, and that I just stumble along, making it up as I go? The essence of BB’s work, I like to think, is spontaneity, a sense of the contingent, of what Wallace Stevens calls “life’s nonsense” which “pierces us with strange relation.” From the start I determined to write crime fiction that would be true to life, as true to life as fiction can be. The jigsaw-puzzle crime novel does not interest me, which is not to say I don’t find, say, John Dixon Carr’s books breathtakingly ingenious. But his methods are not, could not be, mine.

When you start writing a crime novel, do you always know “who did it”? 
In some books I knew from the start, in some I wasn’t sure. I liked that uncertainty; it made me feel quite close to my poor, dumb protagonist as he treads on the evidence and falls in love with all the wrong people.

What are you most afraid of?
As a human being: death, insofar as death means the loss of everyone and all that I love dearly. As a writer: the illusion of success, than which there is nothing more dangerous. 

Håkan Nesser’s newest thriller, The Inspector and Silence, is “expertly crafted” and an “absolute must.” Fourteen years after its original publication, it has now been translated to English to tell the story of Chief Inspector Van Veeteren’s investigation of the rape and murder of an adolescent member of a cultlike religious sect.

Clearly a man of few words, Nesser chatted with us ever-so-briefly about great books and his life as a writer.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Not a book for everybody, but probably four out of ten.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
Atonement by Ian McEwan.

What book are you embarassed NOT to have read?
One Hundred Years of Solitude.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
There are no rules.

If you weren’t a writer, how would you earn a living?
Most likely I wouldn’t be earning a living.

What is your proudest moment as a writer?
Still to come. I don’t do pride.

What are you working on now?
Trying to keep my tomato plants alive.

Peter Spiegelman’s fourth novel, Thick as Thieves, is one hell of a heist thriller and one of our Whodunit? picks for August 2011. Our reviewer called it “a superbly crafted tale, pulsing with tension, twisty as a corkscrew and positively demanding to be read in one sitting.”

Spiegelman chatted with BookPage about mystery writing and great books:

Describe your book in one sentence.
It’s the story of a crew of highline thieves in the midst of the biggest job of their lives, and of their new and reluctant boss who, when he’s not managing this heist, is looking into his predecessor’s death, which he fears was arranged by one or more of the people in his crew. (That was one sentence, wasn’t it?)

What are you reading now?
Crime, a collection of stories by Ferdinand von Schirach. Grim, scary, and very moving.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
No one will ever miss all the great writing you leave out.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
Dispatches by Michael Herr. Vietnam with an acid chaser. Lessons for today’s ongoing, too-easily-ignored wars.

If you could swap lives with one of your characters for a day, who would it be and why?
John March. I love his running routine.

What was the proudest moment of your career so far?
Finishing my first novel, Black Maps.

What’s next?
A new book, with new characters, set in a new city (Los Angeles).

Breaking Point, the sequel to Dana Haynes’ Crashers, is a graphic and violent adrenaline rush. Featured in our November 2011 Whodunit column, the gripping story of an investigation conducted immediately post-plane-crash is “a compelling page-turner, with ‘cinema adaptation’ written all over it.”

BookPage chatted with Haynes about fears, shoes and books.

Describe your book in one sentence.
A team of government crash investigators must race against the clock, an assassin and a forest fire, after three of their own team are injured in a mystery plane crash.

After writing Crashers and Breaking Point, are you afraid of airplanes?
Not at all. Doing the research for these books convinced me how well-built modern aircraft are, and how well-trained are the crews and pilots. I absolutely love to fly; it’s the drive to the airport that scares the hell out of me.

Readers can learn a lot about your characters just by their shoes. What do your shoes say about you?
Style-over-comfort. I’d rather limp than wear ugly shoes.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Beautifully crafted, taut and timeless.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
“Sit down and write.” Seriously. It’s as simple as that. There is no better way to improve your writing than writing.

If you had to be stranded on a desert island with one of the Crashers (crash investigators), who would you want it to be?
The pathologist, Tommy Tomzak, is the funniest, and that’s important when stranded with someone. But the ex-Israeli spy, Daria Gibron, would be most likely to get us rescued.

What’s next for you?
St. Martin’s Press has asked for two more thrillers, starring Daria Gibron. The first is due to my editor in January.

Neal Baer and Jonathan Greene have worked on popular shows like “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “ER,” but Kill Switch marks their long-form fiction debut. The novel centers on forensic psychiatrist Claire Waters and NYPD detective Nick Lawler. Troubled by a traumatic event from deep in her past, Waters finds herself at the epicenter of a serial killer’s rampage. We contacted Baer and Greene for the scoop on their brilliant new heroine and writing as a team.

What do you think readers will like most about Claire Waters?
Her courage and vulnerability. Readers will find that Claire’s quest for the truth evolves into a journey to discover her own truth, a deep look into her soul. In the face of severe adversity, her ability to finally tap into her fears is what eventually leads her to not just solve the crime, but to begin to answer the question we all ask ourselves: “Who am I?” How we can live with a tragedy that shakes and perhaps scars our soul?

You two have worked together for a long time. How does your collaborative process work?
Nine years ago we developed an idea for a feature film, using all the characters in the novel. Years later, our book agent, Lydia Wills, asked us if we had a medical thriller and it so happens we had the movie outline, which ultimately became the outline for the novel. Our process is one of writing and constantly rewriting. We spend hours together talking through the plot points, writing and rewriting the outline and then writing the chapters. Jon wrote the first chapters and Neal rewrote them. In the last third we alternated writing and rewriting each other’s chapters.

What was the biggest challenge you encountered in adapting a movie outline into a book?
The biggest challenge is that an outline for a movie is based on scenes. What the characters think and feel, see and hear, is played out through dialogue and screen direction as interpreted by the director and actors. Writing a novel, however, was liberating. We were free to write what the characters are thinking—which of course you can’t do in a movie script, unless you rely on voiceover. In writing a novel, one has complete control over the characters—there are no actors, directors, cinematographers, art directors. Everything is presented through words. It’s a challenge, and it’s exhilarating to have the freedom to create a story for a medium that does not rely on others to carry out your vision.

It’s exhilarating to have the freedom to create a story for a medium that does not rely on others to carry out your vision.

What kind of research did you do in order to write your book?
Neal: As a pediatrician, I’m interested in medical ethics and the question of how far we should take biological research, especially as it allows us to do things that were once considered unimaginable. For instance, should we concoct viruses that combine the most lethal elements of, say, smallpox and ebola? Should we clone children? Where does research cross an ethical line? In light of these interests, I contacted Dr. Alfred Goldberg, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, which I attended, to help us better understand research in apoptosis or programmed cell death, a real area of burgeoning interest not only to biologists but also to physicians, because it may hold the answers in treating and curing cancer.

Lawler’s character suffers from a relatively rare degenerative vision disorder. Did that come from any particular personal experience?
Neal: Yes, I have a sibling with retinitis pigmentosa, so I’m well aware of the emotional and physical problems it poses, how it affects one’s life and the lives of loved ones.

The principal protagonists of Kill Switch—Dr. Claire Waters and NYPD detective Nick Lawler—get off to a rocky start, yet by book’s end they have not come completely full circle to the more intimate relationship a reader might expect. Is this “taking it slow” for benefit of the series arc, or does it suggest Lawler might not be featured as prominently in future books?
What we’ve found over the years, especially in our work on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," is that the best and most entertaining drama doesn’t wrap things up in neat little packages at the end. Based on the emotional trauma Claire suffers through her journey, we thought it would be unrealistic for her to start a romantic relationship with Nick by the end of this book. As for their future together, readers will have wait for the next installment.

When writing the book, did you ever feel the need to navigate around the specter of Clarice Starling (the main character from 1988’s The Silence of the Lambs) in your portrayal of Claire Waters?
No. Clarice Starling is a very different character from Claire Waters; most notably Clarice comes from a law enforcement family and has been trained as an FBI agent, whereas Claire is the child of a physicist and biology teacher. Claire is thrown into a situation she never dreamed of and finds herself having to engage the help of a cop to stop a serial killer. The only similarity is that the both have first names that start with the letters CLA.

Kill Switch is promoted as the first of a series. How far have you gone in the process of writing future entries?
We are currently outlining the second book in the series.

What’s next for Claire Waters?
Without giving anything away, she’ll be faced with another mystery that will test her abilities as a forensic psychiatrist and put her in grave danger.

Though Kill Switch marks a transition for you both from television to print, how likely are we to see Claire Waters and Nick Lawler on screen—big or small—in the future?
We hope to be able to announce this soon. Stay tuned.

Are there any authors or series that you’d cite as inspirations for Kill Switch?
Jon: I’ve been a voracious reader my whole life, starting with mostly non-fiction (true crime, medical, political, biography) until someone gave me my first Robert Ludlum novel, The Chancellor Manuscript, when I was high school, and from there I was hooked. I quickly devoured The Matarese Circle (what I think is Ludlum’s finest work) and The Bourne Identity. That led me to other authors: James Patterson, Thomas Harris, David Baldacci to name just a few. The last thriller I read (and I consider this a thriller) was Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which I couldn’t put down.

Neal: I’m a die-hard movie fan so I am drawn to Hitchcock—any Hitchcock film, but particularly ­Vertigo—and film noir. You’ll find many allusions to these films, such as character names, quotes and even anagrams, in the book.

What are your favorite activities to do when you aren’t writing?
Jon: Anything involving my children, playing the piano and singing (not publicly), reading, tennis, catching up on all the great films I haven’t seen, both new and old.

Neal: Making documentary films; working with social entrepreneurs on projects to improve the world; solving the New York Times crossword puzzle, particularly on Fridays and Saturdays.