On March 8, 2011, shortly before his life took an unexpected turn, Mississippi novelist Greg Iles was stopped at an intersection, lost in creative thought as he debated what to do with his new thriller about unsolved civil rights murders—a subject that was too big for one book, or maybe even two. Most writers would consider that a great problem to have. But for Iles, being forced to choose between art and commerce always sends him into a desultory funk. In such moments, he readily admits, he should not be driving.

“I pulled onto Highway 61, and a 19-year-old girl in a pickup hit my driver’s door going 70,” Iles says. “I have no memory whatsoever. I woke up nine days later with no right leg, a torn aorta, as close to dying as you can come.”

Natchez Burning, the first installment of his incendiary new trilogy featuring former prosecutor turned Natchez Mayor Penn Cage, is the book that almost killed him. It is also, not coincidentally, the book that helped save his life.

“When you don’t know if you’re ever going to get up, you’ve got to find some way back,” Iles recalls. “There’s nothing better than realizing that you’re shepherding this narrative along, and that if you don’t do it, it’s never going to exist.”

The Natchez native credits a journalist friend with sharing the real-life cold cases that inspired Natchez Burning, in which Cage’s physician father, Dr. Tom Cage, is accused of murdering an African-​American nurse who worked beside him during the racial unrest of the 1960s. Penn Cage’s search for the truth leads him into a dark chapter in Natchez history involving a murderous offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan under the direction of some of Mississippi’s most wealthy and powerful men.

“I’m not pulling a single punch when I write this book. Life’s too short; I’m not going to play that game.”

For Iles, whose flagrant genre-hopping has embraced Gothic World War II thrillers (Spandau Phoenix), supernatural ghost stories (Sleep No More) and even apocalyptic sci-fi (The Footprints of God), this was clearly a story only the Cages could tell, even if it meant temporarily bending his own rule: no series. In each previous Penn Cage outing—The Quiet Game (2000), Turning Angel (2005) and The Devil’s Punchbowl (2009)—Iles had thought one-and-done.

But events, including his accident and the 2010 death of his father, a physician who inspired the Dr. Tom character, conspired to send the author into new territory: the “thrillogy.”

“This really came in the wake of my father dying, and then, as I got going, me being in that car wreck, which was the biggest transformative experience in my life,” he recalls. “That’s what made me say, you know what? I’m not pulling a single punch when I write this book. Life’s too short; I’m not going to play that game. I’m just going to put it down.”

He broke another longstanding vow by placing a real-life KKK offshoot called the Silver Dollar group (which he renames the Double Eagles) at the center of Natchez Burning.

“Despite being considered a Southern novelist, I have always fought off any temptation to use the Ku Klux Klan as antagonists, because in real life, by 1967-68, they were pretty much irrelevant, and had long been totally penetrated by the FBI,” he says. “But in this case, when I found out about the real-life Silver Dollar group and how that worked and how none of those murders had been solved, I realized, OK, this is the story; this really is scary stuff.”

That Iles manages to sustain the suspense in Natchez Burning for 800 pages bodes well for the trilogy’s future installments, The Bone Tree and Unwritten Laws, to be published in spring 2015 and 2016.

Simply put, this is Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County for the “Breaking Bad” generation: life’s rich pageant, delivered unharnessed and uncensored by a writer at the peak of his powers who is mad as hell, and just as heartbroken.

“I think what makes people accept this book is that so much of it is meticulously based on things that really happened, so when you get to things that might strain credulity, you think, wow, did that actually happen or is he making that up?” Iles says.

The author admits the timing of a certain popular HBO TV series may work in his favor.

“I think I’m fortunate that ‘True Detective’ came along when it did,” he says. “It’s like all of a sudden, Southern noir has gotten to where I’ve always been, which is pretty dark and pretty violent.”

Helping Iles through his long rehabilitation were his band mates in the Rock Bottom Remainders, the legendary literary rock band that includes Dave Barry, Stephen King, Ridley Pearson, Scott Turow and Amy Tan. For Iles, who years ago left his post as front man for the ’80s rock band Frankly Scarlett to try his hand at prose, the Remainders are his equivalent of literary Paris in the 1920s.

“You can’t help but absorb from the people you’re around,” Iles says. “To have Scott Turow and Steve [King] in the band, guys who I had read along the way before I started writing and was so profoundly influenced by, to be able to sit on the bus or in the hotel and just talk to those guys is just unbelievable.”

Iles, now 53, shares a special bond with King, who survived his own near-death experience at a similar age in 1999 when he was struck by a van while walking near his home in Maine.

“Steve and I talked about it during our gig last fall in Miami,” he recalls. “I told him about wondering, what am I going to do with one leg? And how I realized, man, I’m the luckiest SOB in the world because I don’t dig ditches anymore; I write books, and I don’t need my leg! I know Steve wrote at least one book out of his own agony. But I’m good now. I’m walking erect. And as Steve said in The Shawshank Redemption: ‘Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’, man.’”

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In Susan Crawford’s debut psychological thriller, a woman with bipolar disorder spirals in a manic episode as she struggles to determine whether or not she murdered her neighbor.

In a quiet New Jersey suburb, Dana Catrell is a “Pocket Wife,” whose condescending husband has a tendency to brush her aside, such as by slipping his phone into his pocket when she calls to tell him about the murder of her neighbor, Celia Steinhauser. The problem is, Dana can only remember bits and pieces of the events leading up to Celia’s death, and as this mystery unfolds, readers discover that she has a history of struggling with mental illness. Naturally this makes things all the more difficult when she decides to solve Celia’s murder. Her investigation crosses with that of Detective Jack Moss, a troubled cop with some serious family problems of his own.

The Pocket Wife is perfect for readers who prefer crafty characterization over cheap thrills. The more Dana loses her sense of reality, the more fascinating (and witty) she becomes. Secondary characters range from unlikable to seemingly omniscient, but all will have readers begging for their secrets.

As the book opens, the concept of the “Pocket Wife” makes us pity the wife. But as the story goes on, it’s not exactly clear whether or not she qualifies as a victim. In your opinion, what exactly is a “Pocket Wife” as it applies to her?
Dana is a pocket wife on a couple of levels. Granted, her husband is the sort who sticks his cell phone in his pocket when she calls to tell him horrifying news about their neighbor, so in the literal sense this label suits her. And here Dana is not alone. Wives often feel trivialized or overlooked. Extra. On a far deeper level, though, Dana is marginalized by society. Because she is bipolar she sometimes lives outside the lines, is too blunt, sees the world through a unique lens, and her odd and unpredictable behavior marginalizes her further. Still, she does what she can to vindicate herself, to connect with people who accept her, to ferret out the truth. If Dana is a victim, she is a victim of circumstance.

What is the appeal of the unreliable narrator, for you as the writer? For the reader?
Writing from the point of view of a woman on the edge appealed to me because there were fewer boundaries. As a character losing control, Dana at times has brilliant clarity, but at other times her instability derails her thinking, so what we see through Dana’s eyes might or might not be true. Because there was less restriction on Dana, there was less restriction on me as I wrote about her, but really, I think nearly all characters are unreliable narrators. Their truths are limited by their own experiences or filters, unique or not. The difference is that Dana is very clearly not reliable, so readers will have to decide what threads are valid, which I hope will appeal to them.

Almost every single character in this book is suspicious—or at least unstable. Which is your favorite character, and why?
Dana is my favorite character, of course, because even though her life is falling apart, her mind is splintering and her freedom is dubious, she perseveres. She is brave, humorous, and she struggles to get her life on track because of the son she adores. I’m also very fond of Jack. I don’t think he’s unstable, really—just attractively flawed. And honest.

“Mental illness is so often demonized, I wanted to try to write about it from the inside out—Dana’s changing view of herself and everything around her—instead of from the outside in.”

What research did you do into bipolar disorder for this book?
I have always had an interest in psychology. I studied it extensively in college, and I try to keep up with current theories. More importantly, I have had close friends throughout my life who had bipolar disorder. I’ve seen the seductive nature of this illness—its boundless energy and highs—and I have seen its dark side, the destruction it can leave in its wake. Mental illness is so often demonized, I wanted to try to write about it from the inside out—Dana’s changing view of herself and everything around her—instead of from the outside in.

Would you make a good detective?
I think so, because detective work has a lot to do with understanding human behavior and with reading what’s below the surface, finding the truth beneath the words. Raising three daughters has also helped hone my skills in this area! I’m not especially organized, though. I’d probably need a very structured partner.

What are you working on next?
My next book takes place in Boston. A fatal late-night car crash sets lives on a collision course when the circumstances of the accident are called into question by a zealous insurance investigator. Was the crash an accident, a suicide or a murder? Told in first person by the dead man’s widow and his girlfriend, the story exposes lies, deceit and misdirection as the two women struggle with lives upended by the death of a man who loved them both.

In Where They Found Her, former lawyer Kimberly McCreight tells the story of a small town that’s rocked by an unthinkable crime. We asked McCreight, who hit the bestseller list with her debut, Reconstructing Amelia, a few questions about this shocking and suspenseful second novel.

Describe Where They Found Her in one word.
Harrowing.

How did you approach writing the follow-up to an acclaimed bestseller like Reconstructing Amelia?
Each book comes with its own unique challenges and rewards, even (I can attest from experience) the ones that never see the light of day. All you can do is focus on the job at hand: telling the story in front of you to the best of your ability and hopefully in a way that incorporates a little of what you learned the last time around.

You went to law school and worked for some time as an attorney. How terrifying was it to make the switch to writer?
I was so unhappy working as an attorney that when I finally decided to quit the carpe diem thrill of it sustained me for a long time. Whatever difficulties lay ahead were offset by the comfort of being true to myself and getting the opportunity to devote my life to the work I loved.

That bliss probably lasted a whole 24 hours. Okay, maybe a little longer. But it wasn’t long before the oh-God-what-have-I-done set in. After all, I had just thrown away a successful career that I’d worked years establishing—all to chase a dream. There were real consequences, too, like our income being sliced in half with hundreds of thousands of my law school debt yet to be paid.

It wasn’t until after my third book was rejected that I began to realize just how long and bumpy the road to publication could be. That it might, in fact, never end. And after my fourth book was rejected, I did start to panic. By then, nearly a decade had elapsed and the economy was faltering. Any hope I had of dusting off my legal career had pretty much evaporated.

In the end, that probably worked in my favor. Ready to throw in the towel, but with no viable job prospects, I kept on writing the book that was to become Reconstructing Amelia. I finally did get a job offer—as head writer in the communications department of my former law school—a mere 24 hours before the book finally sold.

There were some dark years in there. To say that I feel incredibly lucky it worked out the way it did would be the understatement of the century. 

"To say that I feel incredibly lucky it worked out the way it did would be the understatement of the century."

This book is written from a couple of points of view: A grieving mom and a 17-year-old girl in crisis. What’s it like writing in multiple voices?
Extremely liberating and occasionally very tricky. My favorite part of writing is being able to live in someone else’s skin. Multiple points of view mean becoming several different “selves,” which is all the better. It also gives me the freedom to explore the narrative from several perspectives, making the process of discovery that is so integral to my writing process that much more exciting.

That said, it does take effort to keep the voices distinct while ensuring that each character’s story has a well-formed arc, internally consistent and effectively knit into the broader whole. I do most of that work in early revision, pulling each character out and developing their story separately before revising them as a unit.

Molly has had so much happen, and she still carries on—I was rooting for her! What do you like about her?
There’s so much I love about Molly, but I most admire her ability to recognize her own limitations, while simultaneously having the courage to throw herself headlong past them. She really has a core of brute strength that at the beginning of the book even she doesn’t fully realize. Plus, I think she’s an incredibly kind person.

"My favorite part of writing is being able to live in someone else’s skin."

Molly's husband, Justin, an English professor, leaves notes for his wife with quotes from writers like ee cummings and Emily Dickinson. How did you choose the quotes?
Some of the quotes were ones I was familiar with before the book and some came about as the result of research. The quotes all work on multiple levels, which I quite like.

You called Jodi Picoult your idol in a recent blog post. Which other authors are among your favorites and why?
Gillian Flynn because she’s a Jedi-master of character driven, miss-your subway-stop suspense (and yes, I twice missed F-train stops reading Gone Girl). Sue Miller because While I Was Gone’s combination of character driven story and mystery was such an inspiration, likewise for Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Anita Shreve’s The Weight of Water amazed me with their seamless shifting of POVs and timeframes, as did William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.

Also, I’ve been listening recently to Dan Harris’ 10% Happier on audio. I’m not done, but I’m pretty sure it already has me at least 9.5% of the way there. 

What are you working on next?
I just finished a draft of the first book in my YA trilogy The Outliers, due out from Harper Teen in Summer 2016. The books are speculative fiction set in the present, each unfolding around the tight arc of a single mystery, but centered on a much broader central question. What if women’s greater emotionality—so often deemed a sign of weakness—was, in fact, our greatest strength?  

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Where They Found Her.

Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

Featuring the most memorable odd couple pairing since Felix and Oscar and threaded with dark humor, Derek B. Miller’s second novel, The Girl in Green, is anything but your typical war story. We asked Miller—whose 2013 debut, Norwegian by Night, won the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery—a few questions about this smart novel that puts a human face on conflict.

One of the things that may surprise readers is that The Girl in Green is very funny. What was your thought process when it came to inserting humor into the novel?
I think calling it a “thought process” is rather generous. It’s more like a form of Jewish Tourettes, which I think of as a condition of being unable not to loudly draw attention to the absurd. Kafka obviously had it. Proust had it but it ate him alive. Joseph Heller had it. Jon Stewart, bless him, definitely has it. You don’t have to be Jewish, by any means, but I think it started with us as the first mutants. Specifically, I imagine Abraham as Patient Zero; standing there, hearing about God’s plan to raze Sodom and Gomorrah and saying, “Wait a second, you’re gonna do what?” That’s where it began. The first double-take. I’m on the spectrum.

Quick story: I was in Yemen shortly after the USS Cole was attacked and before September 11. I think it was in July or so, before I went to Italy and needed a vacation. I was doing a research project trying to get a sense of the number of small arms in the country. So I’m south of Sanaa with some tribesmen and we’re shooting cigarettes out of trees with AK-47s talking shit about politics. At one point I decide to smoke one instead. A nice kid—maybe 16—takes a book of matches from under his robe and lights my cigarette. “Thanks.” Says I should keep the book. “Thanks again.” I’m looking at it. What’s on the cover? Osama bin Laden.

So: I’m a Jewish American researching small arms issues, alone in Yemen, surrounded by tribesmen with assault rifles, holding a pack of Osama matches while smoking a Camel with a loaded AK on my back. I think a certain kind of person—a person like me—can’t fail but to see that as hilarious. And I was the only one there who got the joke, which made it even funnier. People talk about finding God during moments of terror. I find God during moments of comedy. I look up at the sky and think, “You’re seeing this, right? It’s not only me?” That’s when I need God. Terror I can handle alone.

“People talk about finding God during moments of terror. I find God during moments of comedy.”

You have a Ph.D. in International Relations and wrote your dissertation on the Iraqi War. What made you want to revisit this topic in The Girl in Green? What about approaching the war from a fictional standpoint appealed to you?
In late August 2001, I decided to take some time off to finish my doctorate. I had been working at a think tank on matters of small arms and light weapons issues. I didn’t know where to go other than “south,” and as it happened an Italian colleague of mine had a friend with a small apartment overlooking the Mediterranean on the island of Elba. The price was right. “Perfect,” I said. I drove down in my 1986 Opel Ascona with a pile of books, a laptop and a Yamaha guitar and stayed for over two months in a flat with no internet access.

A few weeks after I arrived, September 11 happened. So there I was, alone (except for a cat I adopted and named Roman), writing an emotionally intense dissertation on a forgotten massacre and civil war in Iraq while watching the events of the terrorist attacks unfold. All this was taking place on the island where Napoleon had been exiled. So it got into my head, and I felt exiled too, even though I chose it. I felt far from home and wanted to be in America. All this opened a space for me that somehow needed to be filled.

The dissertation didn’t accomplish that. While the journey was emotional, the product was intellectual. I built a theory of media pressure on foreign policy—what it is, how it works, how to identify it, how to measure it—which I soon finished and published with Palgrave. But the more human experience of that war and the humanitarian crisis that it produced stayed with me and felt unresolved. I knew I needed to return to the material.

So why fiction? Because nonfiction work requires a particular approach to rhetoric and argumentation that fiction does not. The benefit of nonfiction, when done well, is a reasoned case that creates a compelling argument. But fiction doesn’t always have an argument to make. Fiction can simply emote. It can pull you into a state of being and allow you to dwell there, and by virtue of that in-dwelling, come to new understandings—sometimes different from, or even beyond the author’s own.

Done well, fiction is limitless in potential, essential for the human condition, and the ultimate act of testimony. That’s where I wanted to be, and what I needed to fill that space. And with The Girl in Green, it did.

The novel jumps between two different wars in Iraq; one thing that Hobbes and Benton struggle with is the ways in which, for all that things have changed, things have also stayed very much the same. In your mind, what is the biggest way that war (in the Middle East or elsewhere) is different today than it was back in the 1990s? Or is it different?
The greatest change in warfare since the early 1990s is the advent of new global communications and the broadening of globalization as a process. That means we’re more connected to one another than ever before—through internet, phones, air travel, entertainment, policies, markets, trade, you name it—and can also witness and represent distant phenomena in new ways.

The working title for The Girl in Green was Welcome to Checkpoint Zulu. That is where the book begins—deep in the heart of Iraq in 1991—where U.S. soldiers had to witness, first hand, the slaughter of civilians but were unable to engage and prevent it because of laws and orders and policy. But no one else witnessed it. Today, with the battles in Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan; with the terrorist attacks in Boston, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, London, Istanbul and Baghdad to name only a few; we see videos and experience social media and read blogs by people who are there. It is immediate. It is intimate. It is unfiltered or can be. Today, we are all at Checkpoint Zulu if we have the courage to face that fact. The question is how we will engage with what we can now experience.

Both Hobbes and Benton feel guilt over what happened to the original girl in green, and that guilt affects their lives in different ways. Can you talk a bit about how guilt and the chance for redemption play out in the novel?
Well . . . guilt and trauma aren’t the same. Guilt is when you could have done something different and you didn’t. Trauma is when something happens that affects you, whether or not you played a part. They can be connected, but they don’t have to be. Both men were clearly traumatized by events in 1991. But as for guilt—I’ll leave that to the reader to decide.

As for redemption, these men are different. One was a kid of 22. The other a man of about 40. One is American and, while very smart, is formally uneducated, and the other is an elite reporter with a wife and kid. So the way they experienced and responded to the experiences shaped them and affected them very differently. This is part of the drama of what I wanted to explore. And Arwood’s response was very different from Benton’s. But ultimately, Arwood dragged Benton into his own approach and that’s where the chaos began, but also the joy of reading begins.

We spend the bulk of The Girl in Green with Hobbes and Benton, but we also get to peek into the lives of various other characters who make up the ecosystem in the war, from soldiers to relief workers to locals to family back home. Who was your favorite character to write? Who was the most challenging? The most rewarding?
The most challenging was the “second” girl in green. I had to be careful of how I represented her, and how I moved her from object to actor near the end of the book. I’m proud of the result, but she was on my mind a lot. I love Tigger’s wordy optimism, Herb’s earthy humanity and moral grounding, Marta’s intellect and leadership, and even Spaz’s cynical Russian worldview. A minor character who touched me, though, was Sharo the motorcycle medic. I think he only gets a page or two. But he’s alive for me.

As someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship between the U.S. and Iraq, if you could pick one thing that could be better understood or known by the American public about that country, what would it be?
There is an understanding that we need to reach, which is very different from a fact we need to learn or appreciate. And that understanding does not come easily or quickly which is why I am very worried about a President Trump who has absolutely no understanding of the region or, it seems, interest or patience to listen to those who do. One’s instincts on buying low and selling high are useless in a place like this. What’s happening is that Iraq is faced with trying to take something imposed on it—its borders, its name, its national identity—and turn it into a legitimate, stable and worthwhile community called a state which itself is a uniquely Western invention that we’re still struggling to sustain (think of the U.K.’s fragility, Quebec’s occasional aspirations, Catalonia’s discontent, Belgium’s uneasy balance, etc.). The Iraqis don’t know how to do that and neither do we. We in America had civil war about ideas of governance that cost at least 700,000 lives. Western Civilization itself very recently had a civil war among three philosophies—Liberal Democracy, Communism and Naziism. The good guys won, but at tremendous cost and just barely, and it left behind Communism under Stalin which was hardly much better than what we defeated. So we now need to approach the problem of a fractured and divided Middle East by taking a geo-strategic approach that is informed by the role of ideas in history, rather than assume that small, economic, technocratic or military solutions will fix anything.

Also, if our strategy isn’t inter-generational by design and duration we’ll never reach our goals. Americans think in short time horizons. Most of the rest of the world does not. I would add that we are up to the challenge if we can rise to it and the new administration can humble itself to the task. For the record, though, I’m very pessimistic.

"I am very worried about a President Trump who has absolutely no understanding of the region or, it seems, interest or patience to listen to those who do. One’s instincts on buying low and selling high are useless in a place like this." 

You wrote in Norwegian at Night that a key difference between Europe and the United States is that Europe is tribal—the most important thing about a person is where they are from, which makes a society more closed off to outsiders. By contrast, America is an idea, and everyone can share an idea. Do you feel this same comparison could be made between the U.S. and the Middle East, and why or why not?
As best I can figure it, there are only two countries in the world that have arisen out of ideas rather tribal affiliation and those countries are the United States and the Soviet Union. A case could be made for the Roman Empire and also for Greece after the Kleisthenes, but that’s a deeper argument. Sticking to the present: The Soviets had a notion of the New Soviet Man that was supposed to be supra-nationalist and open to all the peoples of the world. Sure, it became an evil empire, but it was a uniting idea all the same and had an aspirational goal of social justice. Bummer about the implementation plan.

That leaves the Americans. We are indeed exceptional that way, which is not to say better unless we harness our potential and fulfill our unique promise of being a multiracial, pluralist and liberal society. Things are not looking good. And only time will tell. But we have a funny way of moving in waves and generally getting closer to the beach.

What’s important for us all to remember, in these troubled times, is that the European states (and the Americans and Canadians, Aussies and Kiwis) fought for their distinctiveness and independence during WWI, WWII and against Soviet aggression (think Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states, etc.). They wanted their languages and arts and heroes and freedoms. We are all now conflicted on immigration and plurality because we do not want to lose the distinctiveness we fought for with such intensity and at such risk and yet, as sons and daughters of the Enlightenment, we want to advance a universal message of inclusiveness and liberty and justice. This will be a central tension for Western society during the 21st century—how to negotiate the particular with the universal.

"We are conflicted on immigration and plurality because we do not want to lose the distinctiveness we fought for and yet, as sons and daughters of the Enlightenment, we want to advance a universal message of inclusiveness and liberty and justice. This will be a central tension for Western society during the 21st century—how to negotiate the particular with the universal."

The Middle East, however, has to figure out other things. How to reconcile tribalism (which is pre-Islamic but carries on) with Islam, which explicitly tried to temper that tribalism; the battles within Islam for doctrinal superiority; the efforts within Islam to reach their own version of tolerance, which means more than accommodating non-Muslims within their imperium (which Islam has historically done very well, and often far better than Christendom) but rather to learn what we learned after centuries of infighting between Catholics and Protestants, namely that sins against God do not justify sins against Man. Finally, they need some reconciliation—if any—between Islamic governance and the Western state system by committing to the development of an independent political philosophy that is inspired by, and in negotiation with, Islam, but is not beholden to it. Whether that can come about remains to be seen. All I can say is . . . watch this space!

This book highlights the downside of the 24-hour news cycle: By prioritizing immediacy, we often sacrifice accuracy and thorough reporting. Do you have any thoughts on how, in the age of social media, people can remain connected and informed in a responsible way?
I think the recent Presidential election just proved that being connected and informed are utterly unrelated practices. My bigger concern, at the moment, is how the media can be responsible. Because our media sucks.

There is a crisis in journalism today. We know it, they know it. They’re having conferences about it all the time (the true indicator of whether something is happening in a field). The only way for journalism to survive, in my view, is for the good ones to learn how to monetize their authority. I watched “The Newsroom” by Aaron Sorkin. I love Sorkin, but a lot of the show was resting on the question of, “why should we listen to you?” and the Will McAvoy character’s answer of (something like) “we’re professionals, just check our resumes” was very unsatisfying. Sorkin missed it. The correct answer is less sexy and macho but more real and lasting. The trust emerges as a product of the institutional mechanisms that have been built over decades to observe, gather, analyze and disseminate knowledge in the form of “news”—which is a genre of communication. It isn’t “I am the news,” echoing Judge Dredd (to be said with Stallon’s accent, obviously). It’s “we produce the news” because we as community of professionals have created an authoritative institution that works as a unique team.

I’m talking about the the grown-up stuff of protocols, guidelines, training, tools, procedures, archives, networks and methods—at a minimum—that make an institution what it is. Because the value of the news lies in the basis of their claims to validity. We have a major crisis of trust right now, and journalism is at the center of it because we can’t trust the government anymore either—if we ever could. Democracy will suffer a massive blow unless journalism figures this out. Being connected these days is effortless. But being responsibly informed? Almost impossible.

"Being connected these days is effortless. But being responsibly informed? Almost impossible."

Although you were born and raised in the United States, you have spent much time in Europe and are raising a family in Norway. Have you noticed a difference in how war is reported in Europe as compared to the United States? 
I’ve been in Europe for 20 years, and I’m full-time in Norway now. I could talk about war reporting forever, but I guess the most important difference is that Americans still take a triumphal tone in reporting; a sort of ass-kicking attitudes that really puts off the Europeans. That part I see easily enough. I attribute that distaste to their collective belief that it was exactly that sort of nationalist fervor and grandstanding that led to 60 million war dead during WWII. So it’s to be met with suspicion, not applause. But I would also say that Europeans are too quick to turn away from the problems and wars whereas Americans—across the political spectrum—are more engaged and attentive. I think it’s because we have over 2 million veterans of these wars and they are intimate and close to our national experience.

What are you working on next?
I’m about to submit book three, which I don’t want to announce yet, but I will say that it is connected to, in some way, Norwegian by Night. No, Sheldon is not in it. But there’s a thread. I’m also working on a science fiction feature screenplay. It needs a lot of work but I really like it and I’m a huge fan of the genre. I’m not sure if it will be a novel or not. And I’m also kicking the tires of book four. I have a manuscript, set on the coast of New England, but I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. I’m full-steam ahead though. I am a very happy writer these days, if an unhappy American.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Girl in Green.

Like all powerful over-the-counter drugs, Behind Her Eyes deserves its own warning label. Although you’ve probably never heard of British novelist Sarah Pinborough, trust me: She’s all you’ll be talking about this spring, once you’ve recovered from her mindblowing, genre-bending, breakthrough psychological thriller.

To fully savor this Stephen King Carrie-esque moment, avoid any contact with the growing buzz concerning the novel’s ingenious, to-die-for twist. Rest assured, you won’t find spoilers here.

Behind Her Eyes opens with a classic love-triangle premise. One night in a pub, Louise, a single mom who works as a secretary at a London psychiatric clinic, meets—and shares a drunken, soul-stirring kiss with—a random bloke named David. On Monday, David turns up at work as her new boss. Awkward. Louise then bumps into a beautiful stranger named Adele on a latte run. Adele is new to town and clearly bestie material, but there’s a small problem: Adele is married to David.

“This may well be a Marmite book: You’ll either love it or hate it.” 

Though it may read effortlessly, this story didn’t come easy. Although the novelist and BBC screenwriter already had more than 20 young adult, horror and thriller novels to her credit, Pinborough drew a complete blank when it came to plotting her big stateside break. 

“I spent a week panicking about not having an idea, and that this was the biggest opportunity of my career and I was about to flush it down the toilet,” she says.

First, she narrowed her plot options to an affair. Then an affair with a secret. But that still felt far too run-of-the-mill for a free-range novelist who eschews genre-fication.

“As I was about to give up, I was looking for a coffee shop to work in and they were all busy and I thought, wow, this is never going to work. So I went to the pub and ordered a glass of wine and I immediately got the ending in my head,” Pinborough recalls.

That’s right: Behind Her Eyes sprang to life with a twist on that classic opener: “a girl walks into a bar.” Pinborough’s creative breakthrough not only morphed into the setup of the book, it also set the stage for a story told almost entirely through the alternating internal monologues of Adele and Louise.

“I’m really fascinated with what we present to the world compared to who we really are,” Pinborough explains. “We’re never truly honest because we’re never presenting our internal selves, which are normally filled with self-loathing, anxiety, worry; all the nasty sides we don’t want to show the world. Everybody has secrets, all the time. Even if they’re not dangerous secrets, we all keep secrets from each other.”

Pinborough admits that her surgically precise presentation of each woman’s ongoing internal dialogue, questioning and, ultimately, devious strategizing surrounding the affair was drawn from her own experience.

“I’m going to fess up: I’m a 45-year-old single woman and the veteran of many affairs, as has happened with many of my friends. Relationships tend to end these days because another one has started. We like to think that we’re all faithful, blah blah blah, but life is messy,” she says. “What I’ve realized is that when it’s a dynamic with a married man, the man becomes almost irrelevant and the women are entirely fascinated by the other woman.”

Credit the author with truth in packaging; this tale, including its incendiary twists, takes place almost entirely behind the eyes of Adele and Louise. Why not give David a perspective?

“I wanted it to be about Adele and Louise’s fascination with each other, and if David had a voice? It’s kind of all about him, but it kind of isn’t. It’s terrible: I’m a master feminist and this book is all about two women vying for a man! It’s kind of an observation of women as much as anything else,” she explains. “Besides, men are all so terrible at saying the right things that it’s quite easy to make a man look suspicious!”

How much of Pinborough might readers find in wealthy, troubled Adele or frustrated single mom Louise?

“We all really want to be Adele but we’re all Louise!” she laughs. “The difference between what we like to show the world and who we really are is in Adele and Louise. I’ve given up my electronic cigarettes now, but [like Louise] I was the queen of the electronic cigarette, and the glasses of wine at night, and wanting to lose three or four pounds. I am not Adele, but I think I’ve got Adele’s independence. I’m very friendly but I’m not very easy to get to know.”

Pinborough is well aware that she’s breaking new ground with the gob-smacking twist in Behind Her Eyes. If all goes as planned, her follow-up, Cross Your Heart, and her new YA title, 13 Minutes (soon to be adapted by Netflix), will be the start of something she dreamed about as a restless kid curled up reading Stephen King.

“I’ve created my own genre of female-centric thrillers, which is writing books where you can’t say what they’re about or you’ll give it away,” she says proudly. “When people are surprised, I’m like, it’s there; you just couldn’t tell what you were looking for. You shouldn’t cheat the reader; that’s my one big thing. They should get to the end and think, Ah! I should have seen that! Which is the important point, because I know that this may well be a Marmite book: You’ll either love it or hate it.” 

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Mississippi novelist Greg Iles’ bestselling Natchez Burning trilogy comes to a close with a gripping tale of revenge and dangerous family secrets.

In 2011, a nearly fatal car crash jump-started Iles’ desire to continue the story of Penn Cage. In Mississippi Blood, Penn, a former prosecutor turned mayor of Natchez, Mississippi, must face deep hatred and the ghosts of a painful, brutal Southern past before making a final attempt to save his family from complete destruction.

How does it feel to complete this 2,000-plus-page project? How did you celebrate?
I’m actually still decompressing from that ordeal. I’ve lived with this story for eight years, and you don’t shake something like that off easily. As far as celebration—first I slept, then my wife and I opened a bottle of champagne we’d been saving since before my accident.

You had a longstanding rule against writing a series. What prompted you to break that rule?
In spite of my rule, Penn kept pushing his way back into these stories about once every seven years. For an inquiry into race and family in the South, Penn was the perfect narrator, and his family the perfect vehicle.

Did you have an outline of the trilogy from the very beginning?
I did begin the trilogy with an outline, but early on this story began to turn in directions I did not expect. Tom Cage [Penn’s father] and his secret, in particular, took control of the narrative and steered the story to an unexpected conclusion.

What element of this series are you proudest of? Did you accomplish what you set out to do with this story?
I can’t reveal what I’m proudest of about the series without giving spoilers. But as for whether I accomplished my goal, it is with great relief that I can say I believe I did.

You are often referred to as “Southern author Greg Iles.” How much does “Southern-ness” influence your writing?
Like Pat Conroy and Rick Bragg, I am as Southern as they come. I’m descended from a Confederate cavalryman from Louisiana and an infantryman from South Carolina, but I am proud to say that I have outgrown a lot of the programming that cripples our region. I love the South, but we still have a very long way to go.

Your work defies genre pigeonholing. How did you make the jump from writing about the supernatural to a legal thriller?
I have jumped between genres because I always write about what interests me most. On one hand, I am lucky to be able to do that, but I’ve paid a price for that right. Had I written a series from the beginning, I’d probably be a lot wealthier, but I’d also be more confined in a rut.

What do you think about the possible TV adaptation of the Natchez trilogy? Any favorites for the leading roles?
This has been a long and educational road for me. I shouldn’t talk about casting preferences. I am a producer and do have input into those decisions, and speaking publicly about casting choices can close doors that might have led to surprisingly good outcomes.

Have readers seen the last of Penn Cage?
I can’t answer that without giving spoilers either, but I’m not quite finished with Natchez as a setting. And that certainly leaves the door open for certain things that readers would love to see.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Mississippi Blood.

Jordan Harper’s debut, She Rides Shotgun, is a visceral noir that will at turns shock, delight and completely subvert readers’ expectations. Conflicted ex-con Nate McClusky is forced to go on the run for his past mistakes, but he’s determined to finally become the father that his 11-year-old daughter, Polly, longs for. The result is an emotionally resonant road story that puts the pedal to the medal.

Harper answered a few questions about subverting genre tropes, writing compelling criminals, the upcoming film adaptation and more.

Nate and Polly are such a captivating pair with a relationship that drastically changes over the course of this story. What made you decide to write a hardboiled, often violent noir with a father-daughter relationship at its core?
The book is part of a small niche genre, that of the criminal and child on the run stories such as Lone Wolf and Cub, Paper Moon, The Professional, etc. I’ve always loved these kinds of stories and wanted to contribute. In my fiction I’ve always tried to create a world of criminals with human cores, and there are few more human cores than that of father and daughter.                                

The effects of toxic masculinity are often on full display in this story. But instead of leaning into the bravado and celebrating it, as is common in noir, Polly is allowed to take center stage and grows into the kind of tough, nuanced female character that is often absent from the genre. Was this a conscious decision?
It was. To me, this is a book about anxiety, and to me toxic masculinity is about anxiety, about voices in your head that control you and keep you behind certain invisible walls. Nate is saddled with his brother’s voice in his head, which is essentially that toxic masculinity given a human persona. Nate’s somewhat powerless against it, and much of his violence springs from being trapped by this voice. On the other hand, Polly is repressed in other ways, and hers is a much more righteous violence.

You’re originally from the Ozarks, but you moved to L.A. many years ago. How have your experiences with these very different places—and with what I’d wager to be very different people—informed this novel?
My misspent youth in the Ozarks taught me about what I call in the Ozarks “dirty white boys.” Skinhead gangs were pretty common in the Ozarks back then (and, I imagine, today as well), and I’ve always used them as the main villains of my writing. Dirty white boys are sort of the same all over, and so I was able to transfer my knowledge of them to the setting of Fontana, California, also known as “Fontucky.” But the larger L.A. area has a much wider pool of criminals to draw from, and out here there are much larger gangs like La Eme who dwarf the white power gangs. I’m always obsessed with criminal fraternities, and I was glad to get several of them into the book.

Who were some writers that really captivated you early in life that you still look to for inspiration?
The first adult novels that I read in my life were Stephen King books, and I still own most of them and re-read them from time to time. King loves story, and he made me love story in a way that kept me from ever indulging in too much literary aimlessness. Reading The Secret History when I was in high school certainly taught me that you could write a thrilling story without sacrificing any of the pleasures of great writing. And I spent much of my youth obsessed with Hunter S. Thompson where I learned the pleasures of brutal and fearless prose.

The movie rights for She Rides Shotgun have already been sold! I know you’ve written for television for some time—has writing the adaptation felt much more natural to you than writing this novel? Any unexpected challenges?
It turns out to be very difficult to adapt oneself. The key to adaptation is to know what is essential to a story and what can be thrown out or changed to better fit the new medium. But to the author of the work, everything is essential. It’s very hard to cut up one’s own work, but I think I’ve finally made some headway in that painful art.

What mysteries and thrillers do you think everyone must read?
The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Grifters, L.A. Confidential and American Tabloid, You Will Know Me, the aforementioned The Secret History, Tapping the Source, Wild at Heart and Winter’s Bone.

What’s next for you?
I was just in New York and had a great lunch with my agent, the amazing Nat Sobel, and we talked about the famous problems of writing the second novel. I think I’ve worked out the kinks in it that have had been stuck for the past year, so I’m hoping to get that done soon enough. I don’t want to say too much, but the current working title is Watch the Fire Burn, and it’s about a young criminal who tries to solve a murder the police won’t solve.

I also have a pitch for a television show that I am getting ready to take out in Hollywood. It’s called "Rat Kings," and it’s an epic crime story. I also have a few screenplays I keep threatening to write if I can find the time.

Author photo by Brian Hennigan.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of She Rides Shotgun.

“Fiction can help us navigate fear, the same way it helps us navigate love and grief and anger and sadness. At least, it does for me.”

In The Broken Girls, author Simone St. James has created an intense, genuinely creepy novel that links the ghostly, gothic strands of a 60-year-old murder with secrets about to be unearthed in the present day.

The past and present stories are linked by Idlewild Hall, a long-abandoned school for troubled teenage girls—those “broken” by circumstance or disrupted family ties. In the 1950s, four roommates at the rural Vermont school share a bond formed from loneliness and a need to survive in the forbidding, eerie landscape at Idlewild, where generations of students have warned schoolmates that the school is haunted by the ghostly presence of a woman named Mary Hand who lurks in the hallways and oppressive gardens. After one of the four girls fails to return after a weekend visit to relatives, the school tags her as a runaway. Her friends, however, are convinced of foul play, and must play a lone hand in order to uncover the grim truth of her murder.

Old ghosts collide with the present more than 60 years later, when the crumbling school is scheduled for renovation. Journalist Fiona Sheridan confronts a haunted presence of her own, as she seeks closure in the murder of her sister, whose body was found 20 years earlier on Idlewild’s grounds.

With a ghostly setting and an addictive plot, St. James’ story is as haunting as it gets—poignant, evocative and difficult to forget.

There are many scenes in The Broken Girls that seem hopeful and bleak at the same time. Did you purposely set out to make the narrative ambiguous in that way?
Well, that’s the way I see life, so I suppose so! I don’t see any situation or any person as any one thing. So I try to portray that in my fiction. It leaves a lot of possibilities.

From the outset, did you have a full-blown concept for this ghost’s enigmatic personality, or did Mary’s motivations take on a life of their own as you wrote?
I had published five ghost stories before this one, so I’d written several kinds of ghosts. With this book, I wanted to write a haunting that was deeply psychological, preying on the characters’ fears. So I sketched out from the beginning what Mary would be like. That one aspect affected a lot of the story on its own.

Do you think all the puzzles surrounding ghostly apparitions in a novel need to be explained, or do you find it legitimate to leave some questions deliberately unanswered?
It’s a fine line to walk. As a ghost story writer you really, really want to avoid the “Scooby Doo” effect, in which everything is explained so thoroughly that it isn’t frightening anymore. At the same time you don’t want it so ambiguous that your reader is lost, and therefore stops caring. The great masters of the genre always leave certain things unexplained.

What do you think makes ghost stories so fascinating to readers?
It’s probably the “what if” aspect of it. Whether you believe or not in real life, in the pages of a novel you can ask yourself: What if it were true? What would happen then? What would the characters do, how would they react? Ghosts are also a manifestation of the past, which we’re always fascinated with, and they’re an idea of what happens after death, which humans have always wanted to know.

Why did you decide to use the plot device of balancing the past with a current-day crime plot? Did one story take precedence for you?
Using both time periods let me explore more than one aspect of the central tragedy of the book: how it unfolds at the time and the effect it continues to have through the years. Grief is one of the themes of the book, and grief is something that continues and changes with time. And it allowed me to show the haunting through generations of girls at Idlewild. Neither took precedence for me—I was equally invested in both.

Were you a fan of ghost stories while growing up? Which ghost “legacies” motivated you?
I’ve always loved ghost stories. I read Stephen King from an early age, and I have several volumes of classic Victorian and early 20th-century ghost stories. I’ve read Dracula countless times. You can’t possibly write a certain kind of book if you don’t enjoy reading it!

What kinds of background information did you seek in order to write this story?
I had to do research to make sure the 1950s era was accurate. I also had to do some World War II research that I won’t give away to avoid spoilers. That part was intense and often upsetting, and as most writers do, I learned much more than I actually put in the book. Trying to pick the most relevant facts is one of the skills of a writer.

The four teenage friends at Idlewild have very distinct personalities in terms of their impact on the story action. Did you have a favorite among them?
I didn’t; I loved writing all of them. Katie was the easiest to write, because her personality was the strongest, but I was rooting for each girl even as I wrote their chapters. I saw them very clearly as I wrote.

Fear seems to be a major factor in The Broken Girls. Did you set out to make fear serve as the main motivation for nearly all the characters in the book?
Fear is one of the themes of every book I write, and what makes me return to ghost stories. Fear is a universal emotion that has been with humankind since the very beginning, and it’s one we don’t often explore. We have lots of different fears in our lives, and not just of the supernatural. Fiction can help us navigate fear, the same way it helps us navigate love and grief and anger and sadness. At least, it does for me.

At what point in your life did you first decide that you wanted to become a writer?
I’ve written all my life; it’s just something I’ve always done, usually to amuse myself. Once I decided to get serious about it, I wrote three whole novels that were rejected everywhere and will live in a drawer forever before I wrote what would become my first published book. I spent years and years getting nothing but rejections as I wrote in all of my spare time. The experience toughened me up, and I learned to write no matter what negative things were happening around me.

Photo credit Adam Hunter