I cannot imagine writing a novel that doesn’t have music mentioned in it. My debut mystery, BLESSED ARE THE DEAD, also mentions the theme song for the Cops TV show, but that probably doesn’t count. I include music in my novels to not only set a mood, but, also,...
Hey, it’s not by accident that Mitch Berger, one of the heroes of my Berger-Mitry series, is a film critic. I spent immense chunks of my childhood sitting in the dark watching old movies on television exactly like Mitch did. “Everything I know in life I learned...
THE STAND by Stephen King I first read The Stand in junior high, after it was re-released in its extended, uncut form. This book is like a master class in creating interesting characters, and experiencing a story through their various points of view. If we say a...
ECHOES IN THE DARKNESS by Joseph Wambaugh. This story of a looking-for-love schoolteacher who falls for a co-worker with the gift of gab and little else was one of my first introductions to what true crime could be: fascinating, twisty, sad, tedious, sometime...
It was only after I finished writing WATCHING YOU that I thought about what might have inspired the story. I don’t plot my psychological thrillers in advance, so I didn’t know what was going to happen when I created the character of Marnie Logan. The hook was...
1. The iStun: In Once a Spy, which I wrote in 2008, a spy uses a million-volt stun gun that's disguised as an iPhone. When the book was published in 2010, readers thought the device stretched credulity. Today not only are such devices available online for $35, they...
