The plot is very important because writers have to play fair with their readers, but no one would care about the plot if the character work wasn't there. So, basically every book I work on starts with me thinking not just about the bad thing that's going to happen, but how that bad thing is going to ripple through the community, the family of the victim, and the lives of the investigators. I am keenly aware when I'm working that the crimes I am writing about have happened to real people. I take that very seriously.

Keeping libraries open, giving access to all children to all books is vital to our nation's sovereignty.

I'm sold as a literary writer in Holland; I'm sold as crime fiction in England. I think of it as just literature.

[On men:] ... you never know what they're like until you get them home and take them out of their packages.

People just make stupid mistakes. And they keep making them and keep making them, and suddenly they can't dig themselves out.

Everybody had something horrible happen to them at one time or another in their life.

Like every Southern writer, I thought that I needed to write the next Gone With the Wind.