“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ.” That’s the opening line of Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places (a favorite read of mine), and I think about it often when considering the next gritty and unpleasant story I want to write. I’m guided by that meanness, fascinated by the world’s capacity to be cruel,…
When I was a kid, I didn’t much care for books. I spent my time outside building forts, climbing trees, running from cows, and fishing. I can count the number of books I fell in love with as a kid on two fingers—Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet and Walter Dean Myers’s Fallen Angels. Unlike a lot of…
Like most people, I first read Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” in a high school English class. Its plot is straightforward: a big-game hunter, Rainsford, is marooned on a jungle island where he meets a mysterious man named General Zaroff. The General proposes a peculiar diversion: he’ll hunt Rainsford for three days; if Rainsford…
When I say it’s an amazing honor to receive an award dedicated to the late great Eleanor Taylor Bland, I’m not just speaking platitudes. Although I had never heard of her before I first applied for the award back in 2016 (and then again in 2017; you know what they say, third time’s the charm),…
My friend Susan, an aspiring novelist, recently told me she struggled with the concept of voice until she read one of my books. Isn’t that nice? Wouldn’t it be great if you could read one book and have some writing concept click into place for you? Of course, that’s not entirely the way it works.…
How real is her royal spyness? I receive this question a lot, so I thought I better answer it now that the 12th book in the series, Four Funerals and a Wedding, is out. First, I have to confess that if you check the royal family tree, Lady Georgie doesn’t exist. I’ve never actually mentioned which…
As they say in the real estate business: location, location, location. New England is a perfect place to vacation—think of walking on the windswept Cape Cod, dining at a waterfront lobster shack, hiking the Green Mountains of Vermont, or touring a grand Newport mansion. What to do if you can’t get away? You can armchair…
At the heart of true crime narratives are its victims, voices (often) lost to brutal acts of violence. Their lives are hopefully painted in the recollections of their friends, family, acquaintances, and colleagues while we, the audience, circle their bodies in search of truth and justice. If we’re lucky, we uncover both in what remains.…
In my rather limited experience of being a writer, I’ve learned that the only thing more certain than being asked on an almost daily basis what my influences are is the disappointed look on the asker’s face when I give them my, apparently, unsatisfactory reply: “movies and television.” I’m not entirely sure what they’re hoping…
Flight of the Fox is my latest novel. Published by Down & Out Books (available July 23!), it’s a run-for-your-life thriller set in the very near future: the summer of 2019. That’s close! In addition to a plot that pits a courageous private citizen against a paranoid federal government police agency, the story also forecasts…
