I live in a blue-collar neighborhood, and if anyone knows what I do for a living, they don't seem to care.

The crime part is the engine that moves the narrative and allows me to write the other things I want to write about.

We remember when women were spoken of differently. I don't mean that we didn't speak of women sexually - that happened. It was never this crude: there wasn't the connotations, the violence. I think there's got to be a relationship between the coarsening of the culture, of which pornography was a piece of the puzzle.

I don't believe that murders can be "solved." I think that this is the big lie of the mystery novel, that you should close the book and feel that the world is back in order and everything's all right. I want the reader to know that the world is not all right, and maybe we ought to do something about it.

We couldn't have known - who could've predicted what happened in American politics in the 2016? The rise of racism again, or the peeling back of the onion and seeing racism again, was a bit of a surprise in the last couple years.

What's more interesting are the dynamics between people that involve hypocrisy or ignoring each other. That's what I want to write about. I like to make people uncomfortable because it's something we should be uncomfortable about.

I do have shout-outs to bands and musicians I like in my books, but the musical references can be misunderstood. Often, I have people listening to music that I would never listen to personally, because it fits and defines their character.