Writing 101 typically dictates, “Write what you know.” This was never so true as for Taylor Stevens, whose second Vanessa Michael Munroe novel, The Innocent, is featured in our January 2012 Whodunit column.

In The Innocent, Munroe heads down to Argentina to infiltrate a dangerous religious cult called “The Chosen” to rescue a hostage. It’s an intense read on its own, made all the more interesting by the author’s own experiences. Stevens was raised in a cult very similar to “The Chosen,” known as the Children of God. She gives a frank rundown of her nomadic childhood on her website.

BookPage chatted with Stevens about growing up in the Children of God, becoming a writer and what comes next for her sexy, jet-setting heroine.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Vanessa Michael Munroe is approached by a group of cult survivors—each one harboring an ulterior motive—to infiltrate the environment in which they were raised, and rescue a kidnapped child.

The “Chosen” cult hits very close to home for you. Was this a difficult book to write? Why or why not?
I’ve come to terms and made my peace with my unusual childhood. I wouldn’t say that drawing upon it was easy, but it certainly wasn’t as difficult as it otherwise might have been. More than anything, this story seemed like a perfect opportunity to showcase more of Vanessa Michael Munroe’s skill and badassery while at the same time offering readers access to a firsthand account of cult life that most thriller writers don’t have.

What was your favorite book growing up?
Sadly, I didn’t have much opportunity to read fiction while growing up. The Children of God (the apocalyptic religious cult into which I was born) believed education beyond sixth grade was a waste of time and didn’t allow access to television and books from the outside. I did attend public school sporadically between grades one through six, and it was then that I discovered Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, which I loved. I guess you could say those were my favorite books, but I didn’t have much to compare them against, either.

What is the most important thing you have learned about writing?
That every reader brings a portion of themselves to the story, so the actions and motives of both writer and characters will be interpreted in as many different ways as there are readers. Therefore, the only way to write an honest story is to write for yourself, from your soul, and leave the rest to fate.

If you could spend one day in Munroe’s shoes, what would you do?
If I was answering this question in front of a live audience, I’d deadpan and say, “kill people.” Joke, of course, but since that sort of humor doesn’t carry well in writing, um, if I could spend a day in her shoes I’d probably visit a country like Colombia, which I’m too chicken to visit in real life, but where I would love the opportunity to spend time if given half a chance.

Name one bad habit you have no intention of breaking.
Oh, this is such a difficult question because one man’s virtue is another man’s sin. A “bad habit” I wish I could indulge in more often is that of being very late to bed and very late to rise. Although I do a really good job of putting on a game face, I’ve discovered that I am so not a morning person.

What’s next for Munroe?
In the third Munroe novel, which is currently titled The Doll, Munroe is thrust into a world of human trafficking and sexual slavery, forced to deliver a missing Hollywood starlet to a client in order to keep the ones she loves alive. In succeeding she’ll guarantee the young girl’s demise and so is forced to choose who lives, who dies, or find a way to outthink and outsmart a man who holds all the cards.  Otherwise, win or lose, Munroe will pay her dues in the only currency she values: innocent life.

A series protagonist can almost feel like family to a diehard suspense fan, so it’s exciting when an author introduces a new character. In And She Was, readers meet Brenna Spector, a missing persons investigator with an unusual ability: Brenna has Hyperthymestic Syndrome, a rare, real-life condition that causes a person to have a perfect autobiographical memory. Brenna can precisely remember every detail from her life with all of her senses—a disorder that kicked in when she was a child and her little sister disappeared.

In And She Was, the first book in a new series, Brenna is called to investigate the disappearance of Carol Wentz, an adult. Carol’s case is connected with the disappearance of a young girl, Iris, that happened years before—and with Brenna’s own painful history. This fast-paced story includes flashbacks that highlight Brenna’s incredible memory, a fascinating characteristic that inspired BookPage to get in touch with author Alison Gaylin. Here, Gaylin talks about her discovery of this unusual medical condition—and whether it’s a blessing or a curse to unavoidably remember everything.

How did you learn about Hyperthymestic Syndrome, and why do you find it fascinating?

I read a magazine article on someone who had Hyperthymestic Syndrome, and I was amazed. I went online and found some medical journal articles about it, and learned that the first case had been diagnosed in 2006 (at most a year before I’d seen the article)—and that there were only a handful of known cases in the world. Having a pretty good memory myself, my first response was, “That must be awful!” I honestly think that the ability to forget—to let the past fade into soft focus and recede in your mind—is one of the great tools of survival. How can you forgive and forget if you can’t forget? How can you move on at all, if the past is just as clear and visceral as the present? How can you truly be with the people around you, if your mind is full of everyone who is no longer in your life? 

What was the most surprising thing you learned about this condition?

How can you forgive and forget if you can’t forget?

The woman in the case study I read compared the syndrome to a movie playing constantly in her head. That’s what I found the most surprising about the condition—and also one of the biggest challenges as a writer: the lack of control over memories and the past constantly intruding on the present.

Do you think the ability to remember every moment from your life is something to covet—or fear?

I think it’s both. Remembering painful experiences in perfect detail would be very hard on the emotions. But by the same token, if I were to be able to relive certain days from my daughter’s early childhood, for example—or some of the wonderful times I spent with my dad, who passed away 10 years ago—I’d consider that a real gift. With that type of memory, you could keep special experiences—or people—alive in your mind forever.

Brenna can remember any moment from her past with all of her senses. Which of your senses is the strongest? Is one most valuable to you as a writer?

I’d say my sense of hearing. I can’t sing to save my soul, but I’m a huge fan of all types of music. And like many writers, I’m a really good listener and a huge eavesdropper. I often take things I’ve overheard and build stories around them.

What was your process for plotting And She Was? You must have been very organized to include all the flashbacks!

The thing is, I’m not a naturally organized person—which I should have thought of before deciding to write a series about a character with perfect memory! I do love to plot, though, and plotting this book was a huge challenge. I tried outlining, but that didn’t really work. What worked best for this book was multiple timelines, with dates: I had one for Clea’s disappearance, one for Iris’s disappearance 11 years ago and another for Carol Wentz’s disappearance, which Brenna is investigating now. (And by “now,” I mean 2009. Sigh.) I wrote the book with all the timelines in front of me and tried to find ways to make all of them mesh. And still, I had tons of rearranging to do in my second draft.

There are many iconic series protagonists in crime fiction. Do you have a personal favorite?

Does it sound too cliché to say Sherlock Holmes? I loved those books as a kid and still stand in awe of his powers of deduction.

What’s next for Brenna Spector?

What starts as an investigation of a missing webcam girl becomes Brenna’s most personal—and dangerous—case, as she comes closer to solving the mystery of her sister’s disappearance.

What would you be your dream job if you weren’t writing suspense fiction?

Either travel writer or restaurant critic, for purely selfish reasons.

It’s so hard to be a good guy when Russians ask you to spy for them in postwar Berlin, especially when you owe those Russians big time—but David Downing’s character John Russell does his best in Lehrter Station. Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney promises Downing’s “deft weaving of fiction and real-life WWII history is second to none.”

BookPage chatted with Downing about his newest thriller.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Lehrter Station is the fifth instalment of John Russell’s (and Effi Koenen’s) struggle to survive the slings and arrows of the mid-20th century as reasonably decent human beings.

If you could travel back in time to any decade, where would you go and what would you do while you were there?
Back in early 1966, when I was at university, Bob Dylan played the Royal Albert Hall with the backing group that became The Band, and for some strange reason I didn’t bother to go. I’d like to remedy that omission.

What is your favorite thing about being a writer?
Walking the hills near my home and thinking through plots.

Would you make a good spy?
No. I don’t dissemble that well.

Where do you write?
In my office at home, surrounded by other people’s books.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
When your characters start surprising you, you’re doing something right.

What are you working on next?
I’ve just finished what I hope will be the first of a new series, set before, during and after the First World War, and now I’m working on what will probably be the last of the Russell series, Masaryk Station. Still no idea how to end it.

In her latest novel, You Don’t Want to Know, Lisa Jackson brings a woman’s greatest nightmare to life: What if your family told you your child was dead, but you didn’t know if you could believe them? We asked Jackson a few questions about scaring herself silly, the attractions of suspense and, of course, her pug.

You Don’t Want to Know explores some very dark recesses of the mind. How do you write a character who cannot be trusted?
It was tough. Ava is a complicated character and I wanted to make her vulnerable, yet have an inner strength, even when she questioned her own sanity. I had to work to make certain that the fractured woman on the pages was not a frightened victim, that she had strength and resolve. Actually I loved writing about her; she became so real to me as she dealt with one of life’s most horrific tragedies—that of losing a child. She’s a fighter, even when everyone, herself included, seems against her.

What is your favorite thing about living in the Pacific Northwest? How does this region help inspire creepy stories?
I’ve always lived in the Pacific Northwest and what I love is the freshness of it and the surprises around every corner. You can have lunch at Timberline Lodge, high on Mount Hood in the craggy Cascade Mountains, even ski year round if you want, then three hours later, walk along the beach and have dinner overlooking the Pacific Ocean at sunset. How fun is that? And the fog and the creepiness, the shadowy old-growth forests, the sheer cliffs that rise above a swirling surf? Talk about perfect for the kind of stories I write. There are tons of beautiful places on the earth, each with their unique qualities, but I really do love the place where I was born.

How are you able to tap into people’s greatest fears?
We all have fears and they are usually pretty basic, even primal. What I try to do is scare myself in a suspenseful scene, fall in love in a romantic scene and get angry in an intense scene. It’s all about imagination, I guess. [To me] there’s a major gulf between a scary scene and a bloody scene. Suspense does not equal gore in my estimation. Suspense equals fear . . . oh, well, maybe a fear of gore! I just roll with what scares the devil out of me!

How do you keep from scaring yourself with your own stories?
Oh, I don’t. I want to scare myself! If there’s no thrill for me, there probably won’t be for my readers either, and I always try to give them the thrill ride of their lives. Kind of a fun job, yes?

What do you do when you need to lighten things up?
Personally, when a scene is too intense for me, as the author, I finish it and LEAVE the computer. I go out for a walk, do a crossword puzzle, play with the dog, go see a friend, do anything to take a complete break from what is going on in the book. To lighten things up within the pages, if that’s what you mean, I change point of view. I start another scene where the characters haven’t yet learned of whatever dastardly event has taken place in the intense scene.  It’s to give the readers a break. I think not only the author needs a little breathing room, but the readers, too. It’s all about peaks and valleys or, maybe, more like a lie detector test print out . . . calm, calm, a twitch, oh, my intense swings, a twitch or two, calm, calm . . . that kind of thing.

Does your writing process differ when you’re collaborating with your sister, Nancy Bush?
Oh, yes. Nancy and I are “in each other’s business” when she and I are working on a book. We plot it out together, taking into consideration each other’s advice, then, once the story line is approved, we kind of leapfrog through it. She writes, then I overwrite her scenes and go forward, then she overwrites my scenes and goes forward and on and on until the end of the book. When she and I write individual books, we offer “first read” advice or “plot” advice or “character” advice and a time or two she’s actually written a few scenes in my books, but it’s not as intensely unified as a project we co-write.

If you could hypnotize anyone and ask them one question, who would it be and what would you ask?
Wow, I just can’t single any one of them out.  Okay, okay . . . let’s keep it to writing. I’d love to ask George R.R. Martin: “How in the world did you write those incredible books, create that world in your A Song of Ice and Fire series?” Seriously? How does he keep it all straight? Can you tell I’m a “Game of Thrones” fan?

You are a voice for a number of charities. How did you choose these charities, and why are they important to you?
I donate to a lot of charities, but those found on my website are the nearest and dearest for a variety of reasons. My compassion for animals led to my decision to put up the Southwestern Washington Humane Society and Equine Outreach listed on the site. These are only a couple of the organizations dedicated to the rescue of animals I support. As for Raphael House, it’s a Portland-based shelter for women and children who need a safe refuge from abuse. Though I’ve never been involved in an abusive relationship, I feel deeply for those who are threatened/abused by loved ones, the very people who vow to keep them safe! I can’t tolerate that kind of cruelty, nor abuse of animals. As for Molly Bears, this is a wonderful organization which puts teddy-type bears, made individually, into the arms of grieving parents who have lost an infant. As my family has experienced this kind of tragedy, I know personally the importance of the support for the pain that is almost a taboo topic. I encourage everyone to donate or volunteer to the cause of his/her choice. It’s important.

We love that you have a pug named Jackie O No! If you suddenly found yourself trapped in one of your own thrillers, would she be a good guard dog?
Oh . . . no! Unfortunately, I don’t think Jackie O No would come to my rescue. She is kind of “tough” around some other dogs, especially in her house or on a leash right beside me, but it’s all for show. Deep down, she’s pretty much a chicken. I’m thinking I’m a better “guard person” for her than she is “guard dog” for me!

What’s next for you?
I’m lucky enough to have a lot of projects in the horizon. In December, Unspoken, a book I recently rewrote will be available and I’m also working on another “colony” book, Something Wicked, with sister Nan (author Nancy Bush.) Those are always fun! Also, next year I’ll have Ready to Die, the next in the Alvarez/Pescoli Montana series and a new book, which I think will be called Tell Me that brings back some of my popular characters, Detective Pierce Reed and reporter Nikki Gillette (first introduced in The Night Before and The Morning After) and set once again, in one of my favorite cities, Savannah, Georgia. So, I’m pretty busy and I LOVE it!!! How lucky am I?

Copenhagen cold case investigator Carl Mørck rocketed onto the Scandinavian noir scene with last year’s The Keeper of Lost Causes, and he returns in The Absent One to seek justice for a decades-old unsolved murder. This tale of revenge and sociopathic socialites is proof that Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen has easily joined the front of the Nordic thriller pack.

Adler-Olsen answered our questions all the way from Iceland. He kept things short and sweet—well, maybe more salty than sweet.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Thrillastonishinggood.

Would you make a good investigator?
Oh yes, I solved my first mystery in 1960: Who scratched Per’s father’s car? (It was Per’s younger brother.) It took me 10 minutes to solve.

The report of each nation’s happiness index ranks Denmark as the happiest country in the world. Why are you guys so happy?
We are happy from absolute necessity. With the damp, cold winters and rainy summers, we have to, or else the suicide rate would go sky-high.

Why does happy Denmark make such a great setting for your crime novels?
Because I know everything about it.

What is one book you think every thriller fan should read?
A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin.

What is the greatest writing advice you’ve ever received?
Use the bathroom before taking your seat in front of the PC.

What are you working on next?
My next book.

On a blustery Sunday during Nashville’s Southern Festival of Books, local thriller author J.T. Ellison sits down to talk about Dr. Samantha Owens, the heroine in her new series about a medical examiner with a painful past. Owens will be familiar to Ellison’s many fans. She’s the best friend of homicide lieutenant Taylor Jackson, the star of Ellison’s seven previous books. Sam was even a point-of-view character in 2011’s Where All the Dead Lie, which was nominated for a RITA Award for Best Romantic Suspense.

Before Ellison could start a new series about the intelligent and intense medical examiner, though, she had to figure out a single crucial detail: She had to kill off Sam’s husband and two kids. (When the author invented Sam as a character in the Taylor Jackson books, she didn’t know that the medical examiner would eventually get her own series.)

“I fought against that,” says Ellison, who describes Sam as “the woman I’d want to take care of me.” (“Taylor is the chick I’d want to go get a drink with,” she quips.) But she wanted a clean break for Sam as she stepped forward as a main character. Ultimately, Ellison did not want her encumbered with a family. She wanted Sam to be broken at the beginning of A Deeper Darkness, the first book in the series, in order for her to be able to grow and develop as a character.

When the novel starts, we find out that Sam’s husband and children died in Nashville’s flood of May 2010, an event that was personal to Ellison, as she and her husband live in the city’s Bellevue neighborhood, which was majorly affected by the rising waters. The flood has terrible repercussions for Sam, who becomes convinced that her family members’ deaths were all her fault, and she develops Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in her grieving.

At the beginning of A Deeper Darkness, Sam is in this guilt-ridden emotional state when she gets a call from an ex-boyfriend’s mother in Washington, D.C. Eddie Donovan, her former love, has been murdered. His mom would like for Sam to perform a second autopsy, and she reluctantly agrees. Thanks to her astute observation in the D.C. morgue, it becomes obvious that Eddie’s death was not merely the result of a random hit-and-run. Sam gets drawn into a D.C. detective’s investigation of the murder, which blossoms into an investigation of several different murders of former military men, all members of Eddie’s Company in the 75^th Ranger Regiment. Are the deaths connected?

If one of Ellison’s goals is to accurately portray the lives of medical examiners or homicide lieutenants, she also wants to raise awareness of issues that are important to her.

Sam’s search races across the nation’s capital and even to a creepy off-the-grid cabin. Fans of the medical thriller genre will relish this fast-paced and emotional read, which is bolstered by Ellison’s thorough research.

For her Taylor Jackson books, Ellison went on ride-alongs with the Metro Nashville Police Department in order to make her scenes as real as possible. For A Deeper Darkness, she consulted with both soldiers and a medical examiner—and she even did autopsies on four bodies at a facility in Nashville. (When prodded to share the most surprising thing about the process, she says: “That I didn’t pass out!”)

At the book festival, Ellison jumps up from her chair to demonstrate how far she was from the bodies when she walked into the morgue—about 10 or so feet. But by the end of that day, she says, “I had my head in a chest cavity.” The author describes this very hands-on research trip as a “spiritual experience,” especially after it became so obvious that “we’re all exactly alike inside.”

If one of Ellison’s goals as an author is to accurately portray the lives of medical examiners or homicide lieutenants, she also wants to raise awareness of issues that are important to her. In the case of A Deeper Darkness, that would be the problem of fratricide and rape in the U.S. military. Instances of both horrific events are integral to the novel’s plot, and the book is dedicated to David H. Sharrett II, a real-life Private First Class who was killed in Iraq in 2008 as a victim of friendly fire. He was the son of Ellison’s favorite teacher in high school.

A Deeper Darkness is, indeed, a very dark book, but Edge of Black—its follow-up, which comes out in November 2012—has “lots of humor.” Ellison says that the “Sam books” are funnier than the “Taylor books,” and this second installment is gentler than A Deeper Darkness. Luckily for fans, the author recently signed a contract to write three more books in the series, so there will be much more of Dr. Samantha Owens to look forward to. Next year, Ellison’s fans can anticipate her new collaboration with best-selling romantic suspense author Catherine Coulter, with whom she is writing a series of thrillers called “A Brit in the FBI.” The first book in the series, Jewel of the Lion, is currently slated to come out in late summer of 2013.

When asked what scenes she looks forward to writing the most in her books, Ellison says without hesitating, “You want every scene you write to be something you look forward to.” Otherwise, she explains, readers won’t want to read them. And in fact, readers will happily devour Sam’s new series. A story of hope—with breakneck chase scenes, to boot—it is an exciting introduction to a new heroine of the forensic thriller genre.

An exceptionally unusual premise and the strong characterization of a gentle giant hero deliver the old one-two in the November 2012 Mystery of the Month, The Dark Winter by debut author David Mark. Writes whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney, “English critics have compared David Mark to the likes of Val McDermid and Ian Rankin. My prediction: It will not be long until new voices in the genre are hailed as the ‘next David Mark.'”

With such high praise for this first-time novelist, we had to check in and see what he had to say about crime writing and favorite books.

Describe your book in one sentence.
In the midst of a bleak winter in the Northern English city of Hull, a serial killer begins to take the lives of sole survivors in the manner they previously cheated death—and shy family man Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy is the only detective who can see the connections.

What is the most important advice you can give to an aspiring crime writer?
Keep at it. I’m afraid to say you will likely be rejected and disappointed many times before your dreams even begin to come true. Write for the enjoyment of it first and keep your secret ambitions of world domination as a private fantasy rather than a definitive goal. It doesn’t happen for everybody, but the pleasure you get from writing is indisputable. More than anything, come up with a good story. It sounds simple, but you’d be amazed how few original tales there are to be told.

What special edge does your former career as a crime reporter bring to your novels?
First and foremost its authenticity. As a journalist I met people at extremes of emotion. I interviewed a lot of grieving families, right when they were at their most raw, and the characters I write about tend to exist in those moments. I know how the room tastes in that particular situation. A lot of the police procedure is research and guesswork, but in terms of the victims’ families and witnesses, I feel able to write with some degree of integrity. Being a journalist also helps you understand that almost anything can happen and everybody is fascinating at some point in their lives.

What’s one book you think everyone should read?
That’s a horrible question! Certainly everybody should read a dictionary, or at least have a glance through one from time to time. From a “greatest novel” perspective, everybody should read something by Cormac McCarthy. Personally, Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks affected me greatly, while I have never shaken the feelings that I was left with after reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved. If we want a better world, everybody should read The Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela. Can I have one more? Read The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes. Oh, and apparently The Dark Winter by David Mark is OK, too.

What’s your favorite movie based on a book?
Well, The Godfather is the greatest ever film and that’s based on a book, but I’m not keen on the book, so that probably doesn’t count. The Shawshank Redemption shows how good a movie can be when the director doesn’t fiddle with the novelist’s vision. Mystic River is also pretty close to perfect as a film. I’m going to have to stop procrastinating, aren’t I? OK, my favorite movie based on a book is No Country for Old Men. It might not be in a few minutes when all of the other movies I’ve neglected start clamoring for my attention, but I’m going to stick with it.

What’s one bad habit you have no intention of breaking?
I swear too much, and I do drink more whisky than any human being (or bull rhinoceros) should really imbibe. I could also beat Mickey Mouse in a cheese-eating contest. I don’t really have any plans to change my ways anytime soon.

What are you working on next?
The second novel in the McAvoy series is completed. It’s called Original Skin and takes McAvoy to some very dark places. I’m busy putting the finishing touches on the third in the series, which is going to be called Sorrow Bound in the UK. I’ve also promised to write my children a novel for Christmas, and they are very hard masters to please so I’m going to have to make sure it’s good. If it’s not, the criticism will not be given gently!

When Gillian Flynn learned in June that her new novel, Gone Girl, had debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list, it was not exactly a glamorous moment in publishing. “I was in Scottsdale by myself,” Flynn recalls. “I got the phone call while wading in the hotel pool.”

A second chance for a proper celebration came on the Fourth of July, when she found out at home in Chicago that her book had reached the top of the list. “We went out on the back porch—our neighbors are very fond of illegal fireworks, so we popped open champagne and watched,” she says.

Flynn experienced modest success with her first two novels, 2007’s deeply creepy Sharp Objects and 2009’s aptly named Dark Places. But Gone Girl is a bona fide phenomenon, selling 1.8 million copies to date and spending 20 consecutive weeks (so far) on the New York Times bestseller lists, including eight weeks in the number-one spot for hardcover fiction. It’s the word-of-mouth hit that book lovers everywhere have been reading, talking about and gushing over. For these reasons, BookPage has named Gone Girl the Breakout Book of the Year.

Flynn spoke to BookPage from her home in Chicago, still sounding slightly stunned by the book’s astonishing performance.

“I’m smart enough to acknowledge that I’m a good writer, but this is lightning in a bottle.”

“This one’s so different from the other two, just wildly different and incredibly unexpected,” she says. “I thought it would do incrementally better, like the first two. It was thrilling to see it take off like that.”

In Gone Girl we meet Nick and Amy, happy newlyweds living in New York. The inspiration for her parents’ popular series of children’s books, Amy has a healthy trust fund that partly supports their Manhattan life. Then they are both laid off from their magazine jobs, and her parents’ unwise investments drain Amy’s bank account. Nick and Amy move to Missouri to care for his sick mother and start over. After they settle in a gloomy subdivision filled with empty foreclosed homes, the cracks in their marriage quickly appear. Those cracks soon become gaping crevasses, and then Amy disappears, leaving Nick as the prime suspect. But is Amy the golden girl everyone thought she was, or is there something much darker there? And that’s really all you can say about this deliciously strange story without giving away too much.

It’s hard to pinpoint why Gone Girl has captured the popular imagination so thoroughly. It’s perhaps in part because America is still a place where we are most comfortable with women fitting the very specific role of selfless caretaker.

Flynn doesn’t write about that kind of woman.

“I really fight against the idea that we’re natural nurturers,” Flynn says. “It belittles us and our fight to be a good person.”

Flynn is warm and funny on the phone, a far cry from the deeply damaged heroines of her novels. It’s hard to understand how Flynn, who grew up in a happy two-parent home in Kansas City, Missouri, spins such wickedly eerie stories.

“It may be that’s why I’m able to go to those darker spots and always been attracted to that,” Flynn says. “My dad is a film professor and he loved to share movies, particularly with his daughter. I loved to watch horror movies, loved to wander around my house imagining things in the closets. I still remember Dad putting a tape in the big VCR and saying, ‘It’s time to watch Psycho.’”

It seems pretty inevitable, then, that after earning a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern, Flynn would become a writer for Entertainment Weekly. “We were charter subscribers,” she says of her family. “Entertainment Weekly was an iconic thing in our house.”

Flynn worked her way up to TV critic (for the record, she currently is watching “Parks and Recreation,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “Homeland” and “30 Rock,” but maintains that the best TV series of all time is still “The Wire”). When the economy tanked and magazines had to trim budgets, Flynn was among those laid off.

“It gave me the freedom to walk around and feel sorry for myself for a few months,” Flynn says with a laugh. “I spent my days watching movies and playing video games.”

Dark Places came out just months later, though, and Flynn made the transition to full-time novelist. She writes in the “weird little basement area” of the old Victorian house in Chicago she shares with her husband, a lawyer and fellow pop culture junkie, and their toddler son.

Right now, her writing is focused on drafting the Gone Girl screenplay. Reese Witherspoon has signed on to produce and potentially star as Amy. (No word at press time on who will play the handsome but cagey Nick, although Internet opinion seems to lean toward Bradley Cooper or Ryan Gosling.)

With so much of the novel taking place inside Amy’s and Nick’s heads, writing a screenplay is a unique challenge. “I’m trying to find a way to externalize that dialogue,” Flynn says. “I think of Trainspotting, Fight Club and Election—I can’t imagine those without voiceover.”

Once the screenplay is delivered and the publicity for Gone Girl is done, Flynn will have to focus on her next book. She admits to feeling the pressure of what she calls her own “Greek chorus” to produce another runaway bestseller, but tries to focus on the work rather than the result.

“I’m smart enough to acknowledge that I’m a good writer, but this is lightning in a bottle,” she says. “You just do the good work and write what you want to write.”

Margaret Maron’s popular Deborah Knott mystery series is a mix of “homespun sweetness” and “edginess,” a combination that works so well that Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney compares her work to that of Alexander McCall Smith and Peter Mayle.

We chatted with Maron about her 18th Deborah Knott installment, The Buzzard Table, and holiday traditions.

Describe your book in one sentence.
NYPD homicide detective Sigrid Harald learns more than she wanted to know about turkey buzzards when she comes down to the home turf of NC District Court Judge Deborah Knott.

What do you most admire about Deborah Knott?
Her curiosity, her humor and her sense of fair play.

Would you make a good judge?
I actually think I would. I can usually tell when I’m being gamed and I have enough common sense that I wouldn’t overthink a situation.

What are you reading now?
Paging the Dead by Brynn Bonner and A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, ed. by Paul Veyne.

What’s one bad habit you have no intention of breaking?
Me? Bad habits? Don’t be silly.

What is your favorite thing about the holidays?
Our “Christmas Sing,” which is when close family and friends come out to the farm for an evening of good food, off-key singing, skits and much laughter—a 40-year-old tradition. The preteen children of those early years are grandparents now, and the in-laws and babies come, too.

What’s next?
My 19th Deborah Knott novel, Designated Daughter.

Roger Hobbs knows that his parents and sister are proud of him. He’s just not completely certain they’ll read his edge-of-the-seat detective thriller Ghostman, published this month with much fanfare—and a movie deal—less than two years after he graduated from college.

“It’s not their kind of book,” says the 24-year-old Hobbs, who has the face of a cherub and enunciates his words with precision. “It’s got far too much graphic violence for them.” His mother, he says, acknowledging the irony, is a professor of communications who has spent much of her career studying how media violence affects children.

In middle school, while he and his family were in Italy, Hobbs encountered The Da Vinci Code. It was his first experience reading a thriller. He remembers thinking, “I could do something like this.”

He began writing each and every day—science fiction at first—on his 12th birthday, when he was given a computer and word-processing software.

“But I didn’t really stumble upon my genre until I was in an independent bookstore and came across a copy of The Monkey’s Raincoat by Robert Crais, which grabbed me and thrilled me. It was an old-school detective novel, with a classic detective voice, an incredibly engaging, incredibly addictive voice, a character that just spoke to me. Literally. And I thought, I want to create characters that speak to people, where the voice drives the narrative.”

So Hobbs became a student of the genre. Literally. For his year-long senior thesis project at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, he examined the ideas of two French literary theorists. But “even though the paper was about these very high academic concepts, I used as an example the mystery novel. I wanted to explore from a theoretical level what it is that creates suspense.”

The enigmatic hero of Hobbs' thriller has a distinctive voice, a passion for translating Latin and no fixed identity.

About a year before that—between his sophomore and junior years—Hobbs determined to write a heist novel, the story that would eventually become Ghostman. To prepare, he “read maybe 100 crime novels and watched maybe 100 heist movies, and I wrote down every scene on an index card so I could see in front of me on my wall what a heist novel looks like at its base level.” Ninety-nine percent perspiration combined with one percent inspiration when sometime later Hobbs envisioned “a medium-built man in a pale suit driving a Chrysler 300 really, really fast at night, talking on a cell phone. When he’s done with the conversation he takes the cell phone, crushes it, and throws it out the window.”

Out of that primal image—and the coolly deliberate research behind it—both the Ghostman character and Ghostman the thriller were born. Knopf made a pre-emptive offer for the book, with noted editor Gary Fisketjon (who has edited the work of Cormac McCarthy, Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, among many others) handling the project. Foreign rights have been sold in 16 countries, and Warner Bros. has acquired film rights.

Hobbs’ thriller has more twists and turns than a 10-yard-long corkscrew. It opens with an early-morning attack on an armored car delivering money to an Atlantic City casino. Things go terribly wrong when the carefully planned heist turns into a scene of epic carnage. What happened and why? Most importantly, where is the bundle of money with an explosive timer buried inside set to go off in 48 hours? In Seattle, Marcus, the organizer of the heist, wants some answers and, of course, his money. He turns to a guy who made a mistake on a job in Kuala Lumpur and owes him something in return for that fatal error.

Enter the Ghostman, sometimes called Jack, a character with a distinctive voice, a passion for translating Latin in his spare time and no fixed or permanent identity: the antihero as detective.

“Ghostman is what the mystery novel would look like if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had decided that Moriarty was his central character,” Hobbs says, then adds: “The central conceit of the Ghostman is the psychological, spiritual and emotional fallout of having no identity. I know for me, societal feedback is absolutely necessary for shaping my sense of identity. But here’s a man with no identity. What does he think about himself? What does he know about himself?”

These are questions that percolate well beneath the hard-edged surface of Ghostman. What will rivet and impress a reader is the level of credible procedural detail in Hobbs’ inaugural outing. You’ve heard of police procedurals? Ghostman is a crime procedural.

Hobbs grew up in Massachusetts and went to high school near Philadelphia (where he developed the habit of wearing a suit and tie every day because he found it was “a lot harder for an adult not to take me seriously when I dressed like that”). He composed the first draft of the novel over three months between his junior and senior years of college in “an incredibly crowded second-floor coffee shop in Borders in center city Philadelphia.”

He walked the streets of Atlantic City to scout locations. He snuck into an armored car depot near his house in Portland to discover telling details. He conducted research on the “deep web,” the encrypted, unindexed part of the Internet where anonymous drug users “talk about their shared fandom of drugs.” And he occasionally drove up to Seattle and “sat in bars and traded cigarettes for stories about certain methods of criminality. You’d be amazed what people will tell you for a cigarette.”

Hobbs sent his agent the manuscript of Ghostman on the day he graduated from Reed in 2011. He says he is now about midway through writing a second Ghostman novel. “What I want with the Ghostman series is not to write the same book over and over again,” he says. “Instead I want to create a series of books that fit together like puzzle pieces. So I’m creating one mystery, one story, one question that is raised in the first book that I will answer over the course of five more books.”

And with that, Hobbs’ career and his unforgettable character are born.