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.

Lachlan Smith’s debut thriller Bear Is Broken introduces fledgling attorney Leo Maxwell, who is thrust into the crime-solving business when his brother is shot right in front of him. Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierney loves how it “reads as if the writer has toiled at his craft for ages.”

BookPage welcomed Smith to the mystery genre with a few questions about writing and favorite authors.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Bear Is Broken is a detective novel, a coming-of-age novel and a legal thriller all in one, featuring a young San Francisco lawyer, Leo Maxwell, who seeks the truth behind his brother’s shooting but doubts whether truth can lead to justice; many, including the police, seem to think that in the shooting of Teddy Maxwell, one of San Francisco’s most successful and notorious criminal defense attorneys, justice may already have been served.

Leo’s not your typical mystery hero. What do you think readers will like most about him?
What Leo lacks in judgment he makes up for in perseverence and loyalty, qualities that I hope readers find admirable. Also, no matter how cynical he may become once he begins to shed his naivete, he never stops seeking the best approximation of justice he can achieve in a murky and uncertain world.

Would you make a good amateur detective?
Alas, no. Imagination, helpful as it is in writing fiction, tends to be a handicap in the real-life mysteries I occasionally encounter as a lawyer. In my legal career, I learned early on that it’s best to stick with what can be proved from established facts.

What books or authors have most influenced your writing?
Robert Traver’s Anatomy of a Murder and Scott Turow‘s Presumed Innocent are my favorite courtroom novels. As a budding series writer, I’ve tried to learn from John D. MacDonald, Michael Connelly and Lawrence Block. Daniel Woodrell and Elmore Leonard are writers I turn to whenever I need to remember what fiction is all about.

This is one complex plot, with lots of characters all with complicated, often secretive motivations. What were your favorite parts to write?
The beginning, because in an hour of writing I knew I had a novel and a series. The momentum of my excitement for that scene carried me through the first half of the book. After the beginning, my next favorite scenes to write were the courtroom scenes.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve received?
John L’Heureux, my teacher at Stanford, taught me that if you write 500 words a day, every day, you can aspire to write a novel in a year.

What’s next?
Lion Plays Rough, the second novel in the Leo Maxwell series, comes out in February 2014. It takes place in Oakland and, in addition to further developing the relationship between Leo and his brother, finds Leo uncovering scandal in the Oakland Police Department. Right now I’m working on the third book in the series, in which Leo’s father is released from prison and promptly becomes the chief suspect in the murder of a former cellmate.

James Thompson, Finland’s best-selling international crime writer, returns with another high-stakes Inspector Vaara mystery, Helsinki Blood. Vaara, who “is but a shadow of his former self,” views the case of a missing girl as an opportunity for redemption. As he begins his search, “so begins a deadly game of cat and mouse, with Vaara assuming both roles in turn, never entirely certain which part he is playing,” writes Bruce Tierney in our April 2013 Whodunit column.

We caught up with Thompson to discuss writing and the merits of dark, gritty fiction.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Helsinki Blood is the next book in a critically acclaimed series of pitch-black noir—Snow Angels, Lucifer’s Tears, Helsinki White, Helsinki Blood—that reaches its climax at a fever pitch after a thousand pages of a hell of a wild ride.

If you could take one of Inspector Vaara’s characteristics for yourself, what would it be?
I’m unclear: What would I take, or what is it? I would take his toughness. I define being tough as the ability to carry on, no matter the pain or difficulty. What do we share? Temperment.

What do you most enjoy about writing?
The fictional world is so much preferable to the real one. When immersed in it, I feel like I’m flying.

The world is such a dark place. So why do people enjoy gritty stories like Helsinki Blood?
Not everyone does. Many people like their stories cozy, bright and shiny. There is a problem, but at the end, the protagonist is a better person for having bested the conflict and the world is a better place for his/her victory. I’m not criticizing that. Light entertainment has its place.

“Stop pandering for false empathy. Tell the truth of the character. Tell the truth of the story.”

Dark stories are for those who want to re-examine the world and themselves, to hold up a mirror to the world and themselves and ask themselves what they see. For those who want to question the truth of themselves and the world around them.

It just occurred to me that on my Goodreads page, I have a few quotes. The first three in conjunction could summarize what I think about reading, and what I’ve sought from it.

“We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”
— W.B. Yeats, from “Meditations in Time of Civil War” (as an academic and scholar, I’m a Yeatsian)

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.”
? Franz Kafka

“He shall fall down into a pit called Because, and there he shall perish with the dogs of reason.”
? Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law [Liber AL vel Legis]

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
I remember the moment well. I was working on my first published book with my editor (it’s never been published in English). He read the manuscript, gave it back to me and said, “This is an American book full of boo-hoo-hoo shit. You’re a Finnish writer now. Your protagonist is a sociopath. He likes hurting people. That’s why it’s his profession. Stop pandering for false empathy. Tell the truth of the character. Tell the truth of the story. Give me the MS back after you’ve done it and I’ll read it again.” I did it, wrote a book that told the truth, have done so ever after and will do so forever more. It freed me as a writer.

How do you conquer writer’s block?
Never had it.

What’s next?
Another book in the Inspector Vaara series but exploring new themes. It will surprise you.

"Girl power" doesn't quite cut it when describing Carla Norton's debut thriller, The Edge of Normal.

Reeve is a former abduction victim, suffering from PTSD and making small steps in recovering from her four years in captivity. When Reeve is asked to mentor a little girl named Tilly who was rescued from a similar situation, Reeve quickly becomes the only barrier between Tilly and the predator who still watches, and she may be the only one who can save the two little girls who are still missing.

Norton is also the author of a true crime bestseller, Perfect Victim: The True Story of the Girl in the Box, which details the story of Colleen Stan, a 20-year-old girl who was kidnapped and tortured in captivity for seven years. With The Edge of Normal, Norton drew on her experiences, her research and her true crime expertise to create a psychological thriller with a horrifying premise and a truly indomitable heroine.

This is your first crime novel, and it’s dedicated to Colleen Stan, the “Girl in the Box” who was the subject of Perfect Victim. What are you able to accomplish with a novel that you weren’t with true crime? Did you feel there was something unfinished that The Edge of Normal could fulfill?

My first book was a true account of horrible crimes, and I drew inspiration from that, but with The Edge of Normal I was free to explore hypotheticals: What if a former victim, struggling to come to terms with her past, must overcome her fears in order to save other victims? What kind of person would she be? What are her strengths and weaknesses? How can she fight back? That’s what I wanted to do: empower a victim—correction, a survivor—of kidnapping, and make her tenacious as hell.

And yes, there is some unfinished business. I’m appalled that Colleen’s abductor, Cameron Hooker, is already scheduled for release. He’s a sadistic criminal who should never be set free. The beauty of fiction is that villains can be made to suffer a swift and final justice.

Your research for Perfect Victim sounds downright traumatizing. You’ve visited the scenes of the crime and even put on the “head box” Colleen wore. What have been the most disturbing parts of your research process?

Maybe it’s not surprising that writing both books gave me nightmares. In writing about terrifying events, you really try as much as possible to inhabit the story, and this is true for either genre. I put on the "head box" and descended into the basement, but it’s hard to imagine for even an instant what Colleen endured for years.

Most research is easy in comparison. I just visited the FBI Field Office in Seattle last month, and I talk with forensic psychiatrists and other experts whenever I get a chance. I’ve come to consider psychopaths evil. Others call them opportunists, narcissists or reptilian, but experts agree that they’re wired differently than most of us. Psychopaths lack empathy in a way that can be seen as an untreatable impairment, similar to the way a colorblind person can lack the ability to see red.

How was writing Perfect Victim different from writing The Edge of Normal? What new liberties/constrictions did you encounter in the fiction process?

One big difference was that, when I woke up with my heart pounding, I was thrilled while writing The Edge of Normal, because I’d think, “Hey, I can use this.” Whereas when you’re writing about true events, you wake up thinking, “God, that really happened.”

[Writing true crime is] a completely different process: attending a trial, listening to testimony and trying to reconstruct events. With nonfiction, you do your best to do justice to the story. People genuinely suffered, and there’s no room for levity. And in terms of storytelling, facts are facts, so they dictate the direction of the narrative. But fiction has no map or boundaries. The writer has to determine the path to take, the point of view, the characters. And you’re in pursuit of a different kind of truth.

"You write as a means of expressing your fear and your anger, and you try to transform it into a story that is more socially acceptable than ranting on the street corner."

Do you look at the world any differently after writing these books?

I suppose writing about crime heightens your paranoia. And while some of my characters may not like certain legal institutions or members of law enforcement, I have tremendous respect [for] those who give up their time to do their civic duty and those who risk their lives in law enforcement. When a killer comes through your window, who do you call? Who is going to come to help? Seriously, those people face dangers we don’t even want to see on the page.

Also, true confession: I keep a copy of Perfect Victim in my car. When I spot the occasional female hitchhiker, I offer a ride on the condition that she’ll read the book, and then I lecture sternly about the perils of hitchhiking.

You’ve attributed your fascination with abduction cases to an “abnormal interest in the nature of evil.” It’s clear that many other writers share this interest, as kidnapping and torture thrillers have become very popular in the last two years. And clearly readers share the interest as well, because they’re reading these stories. Why this collective fascination?

I think people are always fascinated by what frightens them, but I don’t think this is anything new. If we’re looking specifically at kidnapping and captivity, sure, there are recent cases—Jaycee Dugard, Elizabeth Smart and the three women rescued in Ohio—that come instantly to mind. But looking at a broader timeframe, you’d want to include lots of other literature. The Collector, that prescient novel by John Fowles, was published in 1963. Then there’s Misery by Stephen King, published in 1987, and The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, released in 1988. In fact, abduction stories go all the way back to the myth of Persephone.

A major issue for Reeve in The Edge of Normal is how the media and society exploit the victim. Are abduction thrillers exploiting the stories of victims? Why or why not?

I’m glad you asked that, because it’s something I’ve given some thought. If you write about a patient fighting cancer, are you exploiting the victims of that disease? If you write about the Holocaust, are you exploiting the Jews? We write about what moves us. It’s not a coldly calculated decision. I can’t write about vampires or wizards or courageous freedom fighters named Katniss.

Anne Rice and Stephen King talk about how they were simply compelled to write in their particular genres. It’s not a choice so much as a compulsion. And I think most writers tap into something deep within them and write as an outlet. Maybe they had horrible childhoods. Maybe they’ve overcome addiction. Maybe they’ve lost a child. You write as a means of expressing your fear and your anger, and you try to transform it into a story that is more socially acceptable than ranting on the street corner. Writing takes a lot of time and dedication and effort; it damn well better be about something you care about.

The Edge of Normal is far less graphic in its depiction of torture and rape than many other abduction thrillers currently on the market. Was this a conscious choice?

A friend of mine just made the same comment, and I’m so relieved to hear this. The book deals with dark subjects, but I try to keep the pain and suffering offstage. There’s no point in dwelling on the gritty details. The reader gets the idea without being dragged through every sadistic episode. Just mentioning a scar can be sufficient.

It’s often said that a writer must have compassion toward all of their characters, but Duke is a villain of the vilest sort. How were you able to write about a person who will elicit absolutely no empathy from the reader?

This might be the biggest difference between writing fiction and nonfiction. I found Duke very entertaining, so maybe it’s not a question so much of having “compassion” for your characters as it is enjoying some aspect of them. Hannibal Lector would have been repulsive in real life, but he’s fascinating on the page.

While you wouldn’t personally want to spend time with these people, you want to create fearsome villains to drive the story. Character is revealed through conflict, so you want to set your protagonist in opposition to a frightening antagonist—a David-and-Goliath-type dynamic—and that’s what I was aiming for with Reeve and Duke.

What are you working on next?

I’m neck-deep in the sequel to The Edge of Normal. And I’m at the point now where it’s all coming together, where I’d rather keep writing than stop to eat or bathe. Reeve is consuming all my attention. She’s damaged and flawed and struggling with inner demons, but she’s a fighter.

There are three things you may not know about free-range thriller writer Dean Koontz, who has sold hundreds of millions of books during his rise to the publishing stratosphere:

1. His new thriller, Innocence, a paean to nonviolence, was inspired by a dream about a long-dead best-selling author;

2. His abusive alcoholic father tried to cut short his literary career with a homemade switchblade; and

3. The night before the attempt on his life, his mother called from beyond the grave.

And true to the one-man genre that is Koontz, the mild-mannered 68-year-old golden-retriever fancier manages to find wonder, humor and hope in all of it.

Few authors have managed to produce so many novels (I lost count at 120) under so many pen names (10 that I know of) across so many genres with as much success as Koontz. Since breaking in as a science fiction writer with 1968’s Star Quest, the one-time Pennsylvania English teacher has turned out as many as eight titles a year by cross-pollinating suspense, horror, romance, fantasy, space opera and even comedy. Along the way, he became one of only a handful of authors to top the New York Times bestseller list 14 times.

Genre? Koontz don’t need no steenking genre!

“I started out sneaking comedy into my suspense novels, and as I moved around genres, I realized that I have a low boredom threshold,” he says by phone from his home in Newport Beach, California. “If I’d had to write the same thing book after book, I would have quit long ago.”

Case in point: Innocence, a ­fantasy/thriller/love story about star-crossed outliers, has something for everybody. What sets Innocence apart from his past works is its poetic use of language and the fact that Koontz dreamed up the story—literally.

“For years, fans have asked me if I get a lot of ideas from dreams and I always said no, I’ve never had an idea from a dream,” Koontz recalls. “But early last year, I sat up in bed at 4:00 in the morning from a very odd and vivid dream. I was having lunch with [actor-turned-best-selling author] Thomas Tryon [The Other]. I never knew him but I’d read a few of his books. It was a celebratory lunch because he had a new novel coming out. Some of the moments were very vivid and in color, and I don’t dream in color ordinarily. I couldn’t wait to start putting the story on paper.”

The resulting chase-packed love story between societal outcast Addison and fugitive Gwyneth is just the sort of left-brain/right-brain head-scratcher that Koontz fans love to tackle.

Growing up in Everett, Pennsylvania (pop: 4,000), was anything but a dream for Koontz, who suffered beatings and abuse from his alcoholic father, Ray. The author credits his knack for horror and suspense, as well as the unapologetic optimism in his fiction, to his early exposure to the dark side.

“If my father hadn’t been a violent alcoholic who held 44 jobs in 34 years, I might not have the career I have,” he says. “I’m not thankful that that was my childhood, but it wasn’t a bleak one by any means because I was determined that it wouldn’t be.”

Unfortunately, Koontz’s dark past followed him west. Shortly after he and his wife, Gerda, relocated to California in 1976, circumstances brought his father into their care. The couple supported Ray in psychiatric care facilities for the remaining 14 years of his life. He was ultimately diagnosed as a sociopath.

That kind turn almost cost Koontz his life—twice in one day.

“The care center called one morning because [Ray] was down on the lobby floor shouting at people,” Koontz recalls. “I found out later he had developed a tolerance to his anti-psychotic medication and had honed his fishing knife into essentially a switchblade.”

Koontz talked his father back to his room, but Ray’s agitation worsened.

“He kept pacing the room, opening and closing a dresser drawer, until finally he pulled out his knife. We struggled into the hallway, where all these people were returning from lunch. I managed to get the knife away from him without being cut and asked staff to call 911,” Koontz recalls.

It turns out the staff had already called the police. Unfortunately, when they arrived, it was Koontz who was holding the knife.

“The police yelled, ‘Drop the knife!’ and I said, ‘No, it’s not me, it’s him; I took the knife away from him!’ They both drew their guns and yelled, ‘DROP THE KNIFE!’ I finally realized I was going to get shot and dropped the knife. They made me lay face-down on the floor until they got the situation straightened out. It was a memorable day.”

As was the day before, when Koontz encountered one of only two unexplainable experiences in his life (the second he’s saving for full novel treatment).

“The night before my father pulled a knife on me, the phone rang. I picked it up, and this woman’s voice said, ‘Be careful of your father,’ and I swear it was my [late] mother; I recognized the voice. She said that twice and was gone,” he says. “The very next day, if I had gone in there unaware instead of edgy about that call, he probably would have succeeded. I often wonder about that.”

Reconciliation was not in the cards for this father and son. “A sociopath is never going to change and they’re not going to see that any of the problems in their life have been of their own making,” Koontz says. “It’s a very sad thing to never have a relationship with your father, but there was no way to have one.”

As for happiness? Well, that’s another matter.

“Happiness is a choice,” Koontz insists. “That sounds Pollyanna-ish, but it’s not; you can make it or not. Readers over the years say what they love about my books is that they’re full of hope, and that’s the way I see life. If you always dwell on what went wrong in the past, it’s almost hopeless. So I just don’t dwell.”

Irish crime author Ken Bruen is back with his 10th Jack Taylor novel, Purgatory. Frequently controversial in his home of Galway, Bruen isn’t one to shy away from harsh truths and social critiques within his lithe, biting and quick-witted prose. This time around, Taylor finds his recent stint of sobriety threatened by “C 33,” a cryptic and clever serial killer. Whodunit columnist Bruce Tierny calls Purgatory “another fine installment in the series that defines Irish noir.”

In a 7 questions interview with Bruen, we talked about classic noir films, classic albums and more.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Betrayal in all its guises. 

Jack Taylor is a deeply flawed but very popular character, especially here in the States. What do you love most about him?
His love of books and absolute hatred of bullies. 

You have a knack for exposing the darkness that lurks in Galway, but what do you find most pleasing about the city?
The people and the swans plus you are never at any time more than five minutes from water, either the canals or the ocean. 

"It seems the more I write the deeper my anger as I delve more into the Banks, the church, the so called rulers and shakers. All rotten to the noir core."

You’ve said that your work has been fueled by anger and bitterness. Have you found that writing has lessened the intensity or changed the nature of that anger?
It seems the more I write the deeper my anger as I delve more into the Banks, the church, the so called rulers and shakers. All rotten to the noir core. 

We know you’re quite a fan of American crime novels, but what is your favorite classic noir film?
Sunset Boulevard which led me to write London Boulevard. 

You are quite passionate about music, and you’ve said that you think of music as “a spiritual ID.” Which three albums would you choose to best represent you?
Astral Weeks.
The Pogues.
The Clash, which I think pretty much the blend of anger, spirit and diversity of my taste. 

What’s next?
TV series for U.S. television. I have two pilots under consideration.

Ten years after his acclaimed novel Tijuana Straits, author Kem Nunn—whom our columnist credits for the creation of the "Surf Noir" genre—returns with a compelling new psychological thriller, Chance. Set in the foggy Bay Area, the story follows Dr. Eldon Chance, a neuropsychiatrist caught up in an affair with one of his beautiful, fractured patients, Jaclyn. When her husband's jealousy grows to sinister extremes, Dr. Chance finds himself in the middle of some serious danger.

In a 7 questions interview, Nunn explains why San Francisco is the perfect setting for a thriller, how he approaches writing in different formats, what he's working on next and more.

Describe your book in one sentence.
An alluring patient leads a doctor, in the midst of his own rather spectacular decline, into an affair of the heart that quickly becomes a one-way trip down the rabbit hole, where nothing is what it seems.

You show a dark and gritty side of San Francisco in this novel. What inspired you to set a thriller there?
The genesis of the story was there—a friend who happens to be a neuropsychiatrist. And then there was the city itself, the atmosphere of the place. It is, after all, the cool, gray city at the edge of a particularly turbulent sea, with its hills and valleys, its ever-shifting winds and fogs—a useful enough metaphor in a story about secrets and hidden agendas.

What do you love most about Dr. Eldon Chance?
I suppose it is the above-cited “spectacular decline.” Given what I take to be the general condition of the species, this serves, at least for me, to make him a kind of every-man. That he is able to stare all of this in the eye, and then to make it a transformative experience . . . I find that touching.

How does your writing process for a novel differ from your writing process for television?
First and foremost, writing for television is a collaborative experience. Writing a novel is a lonely experience, which is both its blessing and its curse. And then, of course, you have different tools in your bag. Screenplays rise and fall, for the most part, on their dialogue. Novel writing allows for the creation of a narrative voice. It is my preferred mode of expression.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
Chance ☺

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
There’s a saying among surfers—if you never go, you never know. I would say that applies to life in general, and certainly to the making of art, in whatever medium. Fear of failure can be paralyzing. So take the plunge. As William James said, it’s all about faith or fear. Choose faith.

What are you working on next?
At the moment, I’m writing for the FX series "Sons of Anarchy"—headed into its final season. And of course thinking about the next book, waiting to see which of several ideas will make the requisite case for itself.

Photo by Ulrike Nunn