The possibility of bringing white-collar criminals to justice is ever receding over the horizon.

No agent wants to see a book until he or she has decided whether to pursue the relationship

The rich are different than you and me: they have more money and they have more power.

I had wanted to write Ghost Country for a long time, but it wouldn't work.

I'm lucky in having found the perfect partner to spend my life with

I was reading Raymond Chandler very much with the feminist eye. In six of his seven novels, it's the woman who presents herself in a sexual way, who is the main bad person. And then you start reading more fiction, whether crime fiction or straight fiction, it's just bad girls trying to make good boys do bad things, going all the way back to Adam and Eve. The woman that thou gavest me made me do it, Adam says to God.

These events are swirling around them. In the white community, people felt like they had no control over their neighborhoods, their destiny. In the black community, centuries of government and economic forces were pushing on them. I went in with a kind of arrogance, maybe, that came from living in a very intellectual family, and I left knowing that there was a lot about the way people lived that I didn't know about.