Sworn to Silence is set in the fictional town of Painters Mill, which is located in the heart of Ohio’s Amish Country. I grew up in small-town Ohio, but I didn’t know much about the Amish. It wasn’t until I conceived the idea for Sworn to Silence that I became fascinated by this rich and…
Kinship. Most simply, Kinship is the name I assigned to the county seat at the heart of fictional Bronwyn County in which Lily Ross— inspired by Maude Collins, Ohio’s true first female county sheriff in 1925—investigates the murder of her husband. But just as Kinship is the heart of the beautiful yet challenging Appalachian county…
Stories to the Rescue Why I Wrote A Killing in the Hills A few years ago I was sitting at my desk in the newsroom of the Chicago Tribune, armed with the two essentials of my craft, in order of importance: a cup of coffee and a computer. I was checking out the competition, clicking…
Describe the first time you pictured Joe Gunther in your head. Joe came to me first as a voice, more than as a physical type. What I wanted was a go-to spiritual model that every other character (and the readers) could consult in moments of confusion and stress. At various times, I have played the…
One day, while I was engrossed in Dorothy L. Sayers’s wonderful Gaudy Night, a sentence leapt off the page at me: If you are once sure what you do want, you find that everything else goes down before it like grass under a roller—all other interests, your own and other people’s. I had been saying…
Describe the first time you pictured Flavia Albia in your head. It was during my Falco series, she was just a pathetic, very young scavenger, a street child glimpsed in a bar, intended to show the seamy side of Roman Londinium. Then, once in Rome, a troubled teenager, her character developed. Her looks had to…
Describe the first time you pictured Lady Emily in your head. Believe it or not, I woke up one morning with a vivid image in my head: a young woman, dressed in Victorian clothing, standing on the cliff path in Imerovigli, a small village in the Greek island Santorini. It was so striking that I…
Describe the first time you pictured Minou in your head. I saw a figure of a woman in the mist, in the shadow of the medieval city walls of Carcassonne, on a cold, winter’s night. I could see long brown hair beneath the hood of her cloak, cold hands carrying a basket, hurrying through cobbled…
Describe the first time you pictured Lucy Kincaid in your head? Lucy was a very minor character in one of my earliest books, the much younger sister of my heroine. She literally breezed into the kitchen and breezed out, a carefree teenager. I pictured her as a smart, fun-loving teenager. The next time I met…
Would you like to live in the setting you created for the Casey Duncan novels? Temporarily, yes. Permanently…probably not. Rockton is off-the-grid in every way. A tiny hidden town deep in the Yukon forest. No electricity, no internet, no contact with the outside world. It would be an adventure, but I suspect the isolation would…
