I had a big Akita, Yoshi, who was fabulous. I loved him. We lost him when he was 12, and I've never been able to replace him. Normally, most people lose a pet and get another and keep going on. But it just felt wrong to me; it felt disloyal.

Los Angeles is the evolutionary edge.

My books come to me in images, and sometimes the image is at the beginning of the book, and sometimes it's simply a flash somewhere in the middle.

I began to encounter real-life stories of dogs protecting their wounded or dying or dead handler... or dogs refusing to leave the bodies of the people they were bonded to, sitting in cemeteries for days or sometimes weeks. You find these stories endlessly.

What they smell isn't the emotion of fear. What dogs can smell is the changes in a person's skin that suggest fear to the dog, anxiety, the way your skin sweats, the amount of uric acid that suddenly pours out of your pores.

My family was all police and hard hats at the refineries; they didn't know what to think about me. So I became a closet writer.

When dogs fulfill their roles they are ecstatically happy.