Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft.

I don't find any real rivalries with crime and thriller writers anyway. That might sound a little Pollyanna, but for the most part the writers I compete with, if you want to use that word, it's a pretty friendly rivalry. I think we all realise that the boat rises and sinks together.

The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling - that you'd take on vacation and rather than going out, you'd read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that's what readers are responding to.

I'm also inspired by anything that I consider great. It makes me want to raise my game too - Hitchcock movies, Hopper paintings, Springsteen concerts.

I'm a little bit of a control freak.

The preparation for building a series of thrillers based on a single character is kind of like the preparation for becoming a parent: The best part is the idea - wink, wink.

We're called New Jersey but we're actually the suburbs of New York.