I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.

In the time just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Perfidia opens, we were pre-psychologized. There were no concepts of identity, no politics of victimization. Reparation wasn't in the language. Nobody thought about giving the great grandchildren of black slaves so much as $1.98. And all of a sudden the bombs hit, interventionism versus isolationism became a dead issue, and it was us-versus-them in a heartbeat.

I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

Well, the clues are there. They always are. Which is why when crimes are solved decades after the fact, it's obvious that the clues had always been right in front of them. A traffic ticket in Brooklyn is how they got ["Son of Sam" serial killer] David Berkowitz. You've just got to look.

I needed to address that I've had some profound moral shifts in my own life.

Every one of my books is written from the viewpoint of cops, with the exception of my book Killer on the Road, which is written from the viewpoint of a serial killer.

Closure is a preposterous concept worthy of the worst aspects of American daytime TV.