Ransom Notes

I will be forever grateful to my mother and Josephine Tey for the nudge that started me down the road that led to Kate Shugak and Liam Campbell. Read more...

As a reader, I love stories that grab me fast, and hard, and keep me turning the pages. I love reading about the struggle of good versus evil, and interesting heroes who put themselves at risk against very bad people. Read more...

Detective fiction is my medium for communicating with the dead, but I don't mean that I use it in a séance. Read more...

I was fortunate enough to win a short story award that was named after him. He'd written seventeen books in his series when I met him, was a New York Times best-selling fixture, and had won every award you can imagine. Read more...

In high school, I finally read my first crime novel. It was a Mickey Spillane novel -- Kiss Me Deadly -- that I discovered on my parents' bookshelf. Admittedly it was the lurid cover that attracted me to the book and I was mainly interested in the very suggestive sex scenes. Read more...

In his day, Macdonald was mentioned in the same breath as Hammett and Chandler, and it saddens me that, nearly thirty years after his passing, Macdonald seems not to be as well remembered. Read more...

I know my task force is skewed toward females, but it's a scientific fact (don't ask me to find the actual source) that females are better detectives than males. Read more...

The best mysteries introduce me to an unfamiliar world where I wander happily, a wide-eyed, thirsty stranger, drinking it all in. Read more...

I'd venture to guess most writers were introduced to recreational reading by a parent, teacher or favored relative. For me, it was my late father. Read more...

Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall was perhaps the first -- and is definitely one of the finest -- legal thrillers ever written. Read more...