If it’s a great book, and I’m enjoying reading it, then it’s my favorite book at that moment.
If you could trade places with one author who you have admired over the years, who would it be and why?
It’s funny… I once told someone that I’d give up ten years of my life to go into space. The reason I bring that up is that when you ask this question, I almost -- almost -- want to say Hemingway. He killed himself, true, but he also wrote The Old Man and The Sea. Would I give up some of my life to be the man who wrote that?
I don’t know. Let me ponder that some more.
Can you tell us a little about your latest book?
The Darker Side is a book about secrets, and the reasons people keep them. I’m not talking about little bitty secrets, but big, bad ones. Like, you were in charge of watching your little brother in the bathtub but got distracted and he drowned. You lied about it and they believed you. What if someone found out? What if that someone killed you for keeping that secret, and then revealed it to the world, after your death?
The villain in my newest book is obsessed with the whole subject of truth and lies, and that obsession fuels the murders he commits.
In the course of chasing him down, Smoky Barrett (the heroine of my series) and her team are forced to confront their own secrets. Some of those come out into the light, some don’t, but no one walks away unchanged.
What was the inspiration behind your book? Why did you feel a need to write it?
I get interested in concepts, and they tend to drive what I’m writing. The concept I’d gotten interested in prior to this novel was the whole subject of truth and lies and how they can both twist and free people. It came to me because I was gathering statistics for various things, and realized as I was doing so that we have no idea what the people we walk by each day are doing.
Example: one in three women, on average, have experienced some form of sexual abuse.
Example: An estimated 20 percent of the U.S. population -- one in five -- has abused prescription drugs at some time in their life.
Example: 1 in 25 of all the population (a debated estimate, but close enough) are full-on sociopaths.
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