I had a teacher once, grade school somewhere. Philippines, I think, because she always wore a big white hat. So it was somewhere hot. I was always twice the size of the other kids, and she used to say to me: count to ten before you get mad, Reacher. And I've counted way past ten on this one. Way past.

I wanted readers to be genuinely unsure as to whether she's telling the truth or lying. It meant making her partly sympathetic, and partly unsympathetic, which wasn't easy.

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.

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 a kind of old-fashioned, artisan approach.

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

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.