Ironically, I come from a family of lawyers - my dad, my grandfather, and now my oldest son. And some of my very best friends are lawyers, though they don't resemble the ones that appear in my novels.

A bonus, being a writer, is that the true-life source material is fabulously bizarre. There's so much corruption, violence and free-floating depravity that the well never runs dry, whether you're a novelist, a journalist, or both.

One problem with age is that patience begins to ebb.

I don't have an e-reader. One reason is that I like to dog-ear the page when I find a particularly good sentence or passage.

The Thieves of Manhattan is a sly and cutting riff on the book-publishing world that is quite funny unless you happen to be an author, in which case the novel will make you consider a more sensible profession-like being a rodeo clown, for example, or a crab-fisherman in the Bering Sea.

Actually it was the mark of the stupid, which is what you get for sitting under a tree during a thunderstorm.

I've never progressed very far from my days as a smart aleck in middle school.