You don't see Los Angeles erecting a museum dedicated to the birth place of the Crips and the Bloods and the Mexican Mafia, with a special guided bus tour highlighting the rise of the crack trade, yet you can hop on a bus in Chicago tomorrow to see the famous locales of murders. I have to imagine there's some wonderful academic book on the sociology of this out there.

I'm really fascinated by how the mob ethos permeates places like Las Vegas and Chicago. I have the book set in Las Vegas and Chicago for pretty specific reasons, some of which are that in both cases the mob history has become a tourist attraction - I'm actually doing a book signing in Las Vegas at The Mob Museum, which I am positively giddy about! - and I find that especially unusual. If you don't call these people "the Mafia" they're just a band of psychopaths killing people for profoundly dumb reasons.

I was thinking a lot about the aftermath of bad choices, how people deal with the trauma of having survived trauma, if that makes sense, and so I wrote about this character's last day on the job, how after spending 15 years pretending to be a rabbi, he'd in effect become a rabbi.

It's an unusual way to write a crime novel, to have these lingering, fairly large story points, but it's something I knew I had to do if I wanted to write a sequel...but, you know, people still have to read and enjoy this book, or it's a moot point.

I think, generally, the flawed anti-hero is much more interesting than the normal hero, and that's really what we're talking about here as it relates to outlaws or renegades.

All of which is mostly bullshit. The reality is that it's just like any other Ponzi scheme: the guys at the top are doing pretty well, but the guys on the bottom are doing Amway pitches in trailer parks.

I found myself thinking a lot about my own spirituality. What it means to be Jewish, what it means to forgive, what it means to sacrifice, but mostly what it means to be alive, how to be a better person, how not to make the mistakes my parents had made. I guess that's what one might typically call a midlife crisis.