What I know is the characters in a Southern town. I know the cadence of the language and the voice of Atlanta because I’ve lived here for so long. And I know the neighborhoods, and I hopefully know the people, and I feel a connection to them. And I also feel like I’m honoring them when I talk about them.
Librarians have always stood up for writers and readers in every kind of community across this country.
I think some people are good at being alone, and some people aren’t, and as a child, I really liked it.
Equal access to reading is fundamental to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I certainly went to high school with some mean girls, and I would not wish that hell on anybody.
I always want to make sure the book I’m writing is the best book I can deliver.
Reading is exercise for our brains in the guise of pleasure. Books give us insight into other people, other cultures. They make us laugh. They make us think. If they are really good, they make us believe that we are better for having read them.
Women who write thrillers are called ‘dark.’ Male writers are called ‘powerful.’
You can take risks with the characters and their development in a standalone novel.
I have a few unusual fans, as you can imagine, so I try to protect the privacy of my home life.
People don’t just love mysteries. They are obsessed with them – especially the kind that are never definitively solved.
Flannery O’Connor was a revelation for me. When I read her, I was very young, and I didn’t understand what she was doing. I didn’t see any of the Catholicism or any of the social stuff.
My job isn’t to preach to people, it’s to entertain them. I like letting the characters speak for themselves.
I’ve always been interested in violence, even as a teenager. I loved ‘Helter Skelter’ and books like that.
When I’m on a good go, I can do 12, 13 hours of writing.
My father and his eight siblings grew up in the kind of poverty that Americans don’t like to talk about unless a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina strikes, and then the conversation only lasts as long as the news cycle. His family squatted in shacks. The children scavenged for food.
It sounds pretentious to say I ‘divide’ my time, but when I am home, that usually means my house in Atlanta or my cabin in the North Georgia Mountains. The latter is where I do the majority of my writing.
As awful as crime can be, it’s what happens afterward – the struggling to get out of bed, to put one foot in front of the other – that alters people.
Even if you live in a big city, everybody lives in a small town. We identify ourselves by our neighborhoods – ‘I live in the Village, or in Chelsea.’
I think a lot of people are curious about what makes people do what they do, and I guess my curiosity isn’t hidden in any way.
It was always my dream to write for a living.
Pushing the boundaries of polite society does not just fall under the purview of crime fiction authors.
As a Southerner, I love obstacles for my characters.
I’m really boring. I get up early. I go to bed early. I don’t smoke or drink. I mean, I’ll eat a cupcake. I’m just not a crazy, stay-out-all-night sort of person. I love writing.
No crime lab in the world looks like the ‘CSI’ ones because there’s simply not the money for all those fancy machines.
I grew up watching the ‘People’s Choice Awards.’
Crafting a piece of gripping, narrative true crime that engages the world is not that different from crafting a piece of crime fiction.
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