It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.

With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.

I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.