After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Americans were panicked. They had lost Vietnam to Communism, and they were desperate to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to Afghanistan. While doing research for Jameela Green Ruins Everything, I came across fascinating research about the extent the U.S. would go to make sure the…
I’ve written a number of crime or psychological thriller books now and each is still a voyage of discovery in terms of the writing process. I remember being interviewed at the Edinburgh Book Festival and was asked how long it too me to plot out each book. The interviewer gave an audible gasp when I…
My novel Darling Girl used the bones of the original Peter Pan story to ask, “What would Peter and the Darling family be like today if the boy who couldn’t grow up, got older? And what would Neverland magic look like in our world?” I’ve always loved fairytales, and as an adult, I’ve been intrigued…
Mysteries are an acquired taste, and they come in a dazzling array of combinations and flavors. With that in mind, I hope this tasting menu may provide some new staples for your enjoyment: Hors d’oeuvre – Lady Molly of Scotland Yard by Baroness Orczy – Closely aligned with Sherlock Holmes. This detective and sidekick are both women,…
When Donald Westlake adopted the pseudonym of Richard Stark and wrote the Parker novels, which follow a master thief through a series of bloody heists and betrayals, he pulled off a magic trick. The novels reveal precious little about Parker—not even his full name, much less a detailed family history—and yet he remains a compelling…
All the titles in my Kinship Mystery Series, inspired by Ohio’s true first female sheriff in 1925, have co-narrators. In each novel, Sheriff Lily Ross shares her investigations from her point of view. She’s joined by a co-narrator in each novel who might just have a different perspective on Lily and on Lily’s case and,…
Curfew was a strange book to write. When I told people what I was working on—that I was writing a novel about a near-future Britain in which all men are electronically tagged and not allowed out after 7 P.M.—women would laugh, and men would turn pale and ask me if I was serious. Like so…
A locked-room mystery is the ultimate puzzle. Not only is the mystery plot fairly clued, so the reader can match wits with the detective, but the crime itself appears to be truly impossible. This style of mystery had its heyday in what’s known as the Golden Age of detective fiction, a period loosely defined as…
There is something about a criminal doctor that is especially chilling. We are conditioned to trust them to heal us, to blindly put our faith in them in a way we do with, possibly, no one else. We take pills they prescribe without knowing what they are. We even allow them to render us unconscious…
My new novel, No Second Chances, is a full-throttle action thriller set in modern-day Los Angeles. It tells the story of Luke Kingsley, a canceled actor who is believed to have killed his wife, and Kitty Rae, an effervescent young woman who has arrived in Hollywood in pursuit of her dreams. These colorful protagonists soon…
