The Poet follows Samantha Jazz, the lead detective on the case of a violent serial killer dubbed “The Poet,” named as such for the poems he leaves with the bodies of his victims. How did the subject of poetry enter the novel? My mother wrote poetry while I was growing up and I recently found some of…
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…
Join Thomas Pluck for a chat with Don Winslow as they discuss his latest book, Broken, and then continue reading for a full review! Don Winslow is the bestselling author of the blockbuster epic Cartel trilogy, the NYPD cop saga The Force, the thriller Savages which was made into a movie directed by Oliver Stone, the…
Describe the first time you pictured Kate McGuire in your head. In my mind (and my very first, toss-away draft), I showed a bit of Kate’s life in Manhattan—including that one momentous day when the restaurant where she’d worked for two years shuttered (embezzlement), she lost her tiny, homey apartment (gone condo), and she broke off…
You are most well-known for your bestselling holiday fiction writings such as The Christmas Shoes and The Christmas Town, but what inspired you to move in a different direction and blend fiction with biblical prophecy for The Time of Jacob’s Trouble? People are wondering, “What in the world is going on?” I heard a poll…
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…
Describe the first time you pictured Joanna in your mind. It occurred while I was reading Sherlock Holmes’s description of Irene Adler in Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia. As you may recall, she was threatening to release very compromising photographs of her and the King of Bohemia unless he ended his engagement to the…
Describe the first time you pictured Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne in your head? I had decided to write a mystery, naive thing that I was, and to educate myself, I read every book I could find in our city library that had won, or been nominated for one of the big three mystery…
Describe the first time you pictured Buck Schatz in your head. Buck Schatz is a 90-year-old World War 2 veteran, and a retired Memphis detective, whose colorful past has a tendency not to stay in the past. The idea I had when I started writing this character was that I wanted to convey to readers…
