Lone women shouldn't stop in the middle of nowhere for giant unkempt strangers with duct tape on their faces.

People who wear glasses, without them they always look unfocused, vulnerable. Out in the open. A layer removed.

Practically any Western has a homesteader in trouble, and a mysterious rider shows up off the range, solves the problem over two or three days, and then rides off into the sunset.

Intensely vivid characters, terrible crimes, and a brutal deep-frozen landscape all prove beyond a reasonable doubt that cold nurtures good and evil as readily as heat ... and that Giles Blunt is a really tremendous crime novelist.

I have the "thing" worked out - the trick or the surprise or the pivotal fact. Then I just start somewhere and let the story work itself out.

Full of thrills and tension - but smart and human too.

The best fights are the ones you don't have", a wise man once said to me.