If you take 67 brush fires times 10 years, that's almost 700 right there. Those brush fires are incredibly dangerous, all those homes going down proved that.

The Onion Field made a real writer. And then I knew it was over, I couldn't be a cop anymore.

I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

I hadn't done anything in six years; I was just vegetating.

When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice.

Today, lawyers are attacking more; they're attacking everything. A good example is the O.J. Simpson case.