Meg Gardiner and the Deadshrinker

Interviewed by Sandra Parshall

We’re giving away three hardcover copies of Meg Gardiner’s just-released thriller, The Liar’s Lullaby. To enter the drawing, leave a comment and include an e-mail address where you can be contacted.


Meg Gardiner, a lawyer and teacher in a previous life, is now the Edgar Award-winning author of the Evan Delaney series and the Jo Beckett series. A Californian living in England, she was published in Europe for years but couldn’t interest a U.S. publisher – until Stephen King, whom she had never met, happened to pick up one of her books on a trip. Today she talks about the improbable turn in her career, as well as her new book and her approach to writing thrillers.

Q. Tell us about The Liar’s Lullaby.

A. It’s the third thriller featuring forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett. When a singer dies gruesomely during her entrance at a stadium rock concert, the San Francisco police ask Jo to perform a psychological autopsy. But the investigation turns Jo’s life upside down, because singer Tasia McFarland was the ex-wife of the President of the United States.

Tasia is a country-pop singer whose rocky life has been laced with addictions, breakdowns, erratic behavior, and broken relationships. Most notorious is her failed marriage to Robert McFarland, the former army officer who now occupies the White House. But Tasia’s on a comeback tour. In the opener for her spectacular stage show, she slides down a zip line as helicopters fly overhead. And the stunt goes disastrously wrong. The helicopters crash, the crowd stampedes, and Tasia plummets to the field, dead—from a gunshot wound.

Video can’t prove that the shot came from Tasia’s own Colt .45 and the ballistics report comes up empty. So the authorities call on Jo Beckett to do a psychological autopsy and clean up the potential political disaster. But as Jo sifts through the facts, she finds only more questions. Was Tasia’s gun loaded? Did she kill herself in one last cry for attention? Were her politically-charged lyrics the rantings of a paranoid woman losing her grip? Or warnings from a woman afraid and in danger? The media hounds Jo and the White House pressures her to shut down the investigation. Conspiracy theories ignite and right wing fanatics arm for a confrontation with the government. Jo finds herself racing to extinguish the conspiracy rumor mill before it incites a level of violence that reaches America’s highest corridors of power.

Q. Why did you make your protagonist, Jo, a forensic psychiatrist? What was it about this profession that appealed to you, and what can you do with this character that you might not be able to do if she were a lawyer or a detective?

A. Jo calls herself a deadshrinker. She analyzes the dead for the police. She’s the last resort in baffling cases. When the cops and the medical examiner can’t determine the manner of a victim’s death, they turn to Jo to perform a psychological autopsy and figure out whether it was accident, suicide, or murder.

Jo looks at victims’ emotional, moral, and psychological lives to figure out why they died. She digs beneath the clinical what and how of the police lab, into the messy, mysterious, and spooky realm of the mind. And that’s what fascinated me about her job.

CSI is great, but I wanted to go beyond it. In the real world, crime lab technology is not an infallible truth-o-meter. Physical evidence is not in fact bulletproof. Real life is murkier—and more fascinating. That’s what Jo explores. She goes beyond DNA sequencing and gas chromatography to uncover why a victim has died. And she can come at cases from fresh, atypical angles.

Q. How did you educate yourself about the work of forensic psychiatrists? Did you speak with any pros in the field?

A. I read. A lot. And I talked with real forensic psychiatrists about their jobs. It’s fascinating, difficult, and important work. I’m also lucky to have a sister who’s an MD trained in both neurology and psychiatry. She’s wonderful—and patient—about explaining medical and psychiatric issues, recommending books, and reading my first drafts to correct everything I goof up.

Q. Your career has taken an unusual course – you were published first in Britain, weren’t you, although your books are set in the U.S.? Would you tell us about your road to publication and how your career has evolved?

A. Writing is my third career, after law and teaching. I wrote my first novel when I moved to the U.K. after my husband took a job in London. But I’m a Californian, so I set the story in my hometown, Santa Barbara.

My agent presumed that an American woman who wrote novels set in the USA would generate interest from U.S. publishers. He sent the manuscript to U.K. publishers as well, but told me not to hold my breath. However, China Lake was bought almost immediately by a British publisher, followed by French and Dutch publishers—while American publishers said: No, thanks.

American publishers then turned down the sequel, Mission Canyon. They didn’t want to pick up a series mid-stream. This continued for five books. I couldn’t complain, because after all, the Evan Delaney novels were published everywhere in the English-speaking world besides the USA, and in a dozen foreign languages to boot. But I was frustrated that my books weren’t available at home. And my relatives were starting to think I had invented this whole “published writer” thing.

Then, through serendipity, Stephen King picked up China Lake to read on a flight to the U.K. He liked it, read the rest of the Evan Delaney series, and learned that I had no American publisher. He wrote an article on his website, urging readers to find my books. And then, in a spectacular burst of support for another writer, he wrote a column about my novels in Entertainment Weekly. Forty-eight hours later, fourteen American publishers had contacted me about publishing my work. Dutton bought my entire backlist plus the Jo Beckett series, which I was developing at the time.

Since then, Dutton and its fellow Penguin imprint, NAL, have published all my novels. American publication has given me a tremendous boost in visibility. My books have hit the bestseller lists in a number of countries, and are now published in, I think, 19 languages. The Dirty Secrets Club was a USA Today summer reading pick, was chosen by Amazon as one of its Top Ten Thrillers of 2008, and won the RT Reviewers Choice Award for Best Procedural novel of the year. And to my surprise and delight, in 2009 China Lake won the Edgar for Best Paperback Original. That was a thrill, validation, just a stunning honor. So: Thank you, MWA, and Dutton, and NAL, and Mr. King.

Q. How has your life changed now that you’re a mystery star in the U.S.? Are you spending more time here than before?

A. Star—ooh, I’m printing that out, so that the next time my kids demand to know when dinner will be ready, I can wave it at them. I’m excited that my books are now published in America and yes, I’m spending a lot more time in the U.S. But that’s okay—I may currently reside in London, but I’m a Californian, and I’m happy that when I attend Bouchercon, Left Coast Crime, ThrillerFest, or walk into American bookstores, I can find my novels. Even better, all this travel means I get to see my mom more often. And I get to meet American readers, writers, and booksellers, which is wonderful. A few weeks ago in Portland, Oregon, I signed books at the Public Library Association national conference for three hours solid. That ain’t bad.

Q. You describe yourself as an “escaped” lawyer. I know several attorneys-turned-writers who say they’re “recovering” lawyers. This always make me curious – why were you eager to get out of the legal profession after going to school for so many years to get into it? Was the reality of law practice different from your expectations?

A. I always knew I wanted to write, but thought: I don’t want to live in a dump and be an unemployed novelist. I’d rather have a profession that will serve me all my life, and pay the bills, and allow me to write in my spare time. My grandfather was a lawyer who enjoyed a long, satisfying career, so I followed his path. And I love the law.

But after working in commercial litigation I realized I didn’t want to argue for a living. And litigation is both stressful and time consuming—you work intense hours. I didn’t want to burn the candle at both ends and the middle while I had little kids. So I jumped ship. I went and taught legal research and writing at the University of California, which was a blast.

Q. Your family seems to be full of musicians. Are you also musical? Did the popular music world feel like a natural one for you to explore in The Liar’s Lullaby?

A. I love musicians. Guitar players especially. I dig them so much, I married one. And the popular music world can be fascinating, exciting, and over the top, all at once. The Liar’s Lullaby is about fame, personality, and excess. But it’s equally about music as a singer’s core, obsession, and bliss—Tasia McFarland composes and sings as if holding back the songs would cause her to self-combust.

The book is also about celebrity and politics colliding in an explosive mess that threatens to scorch everybody involved, including Jo.

I am not a musician. In high school I was a mime, and there was a good reason for that.

Q. Your books are marketed as thrillers. How would you define the difference between a mystery and a thriller? What makes your novels thrillers?

A. In a mystery, the object is to solve a whodunit. The plot focuses on a detective’s efforts to interview suspects, sort clues, and solve the puzzle. Revealing the murderer’s identity is the climax of the story.

Thrillers play on a broader field, and they race across it. They might feature a murder mystery. But they might not. What they should always feature is pace, high stakes, and characters facing the worst crises of their lives. In thrillers, people face severe pressure and increasing threats—people including the protagonist, her friends, family, community, and perhaps her nation. Thrillers need to frighten, get pulses pounding, and keep people from putting down the book.

Q. You have one scene in The Liar’s Lullaby that involves a highrise building, dangling cables, and... Well, I won’t say more and spoil it for readers. How do you come up with scenarios like that? If you want an action scene that’s exciting and different, do you brainstorm with friends, read about weird accidents, or just turn your imagination loose and follow it wherever it goes?

A. Weird accidents… thanks, that’s a great idea. Let me note that down.

To write action scenes, you have to know what’s already been done—so you can purge those ideas from your writing. Cop in a fast car chases hit men; gunfire ensues. That had better be Bullitt, because if you’re writing that scene today it’s a retread, minus Steve McQueen and the Mustang. If readers have read or seen it a hundred times already, it’s a cliché. They know how it ends. It won’t thrill. And there goes your thriller.

So what do I do? I turn ideas inside out. Upset expectations. And back my characters into tight corners, literally or metaphorically. Then I think: Yeah, let’s see you get out of this one. Go ahead, drive over those spikes and get SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE. Then fight off the villain. Yep, that guy, the one toting a twelve-gauge shotgun—and fight him off using only a can of house paint. And when the good guys try, I throw crazed animals at them, or a 757 at takeoff velocity.

Sad to say, I also observe everyday situations and wonder how they could go horribly awry.

Q. Although your books are thrillers and, to use a cliché, action-packed, you also have quieter emotional scenes. Which is more difficult for you to write? Do you believe a thriller must have both?

A. “Must” is tricky. I definitely need to write both. Neither is more difficult; they just present different challenges. When writing action an author has to consider blocking (that is, moving the characters around physically), freshness, authenticity, and clarity. When writing quieter emotional scenes, you have to consider honesty, revelation, authenticity, and clarity. Actually, the two types of scenes are not so different. Getting the right emotional tone, illuminating the moment, revealing character through the choices people make, is vital for both.

Thrillers cannot thrive on action alone. That’s like turning up the volume on death metal and leaving it at maximum while a guitarist shreds nonstop. Authors have to give readers a breather. If you don’t, they become numb, and the action loses its impact, no matter how loud the screaming or how big the explosions.

Q. Is any subject matter off-limits to you – are there some things you would refuse to write about even if your publisher wanted you to?

A. Child abuse or molestation. I find it too upsetting. And I don’t want to spend a year of my life writing about something that would drag me, and readers, down. For what purpose? Entertainment? I don’t think so.

Q. In parting, what advice do you have for aspiring crime fiction writers?

A. Read. Learn about the genre. Learn what works, and what doesn’t. Read widely, read the classics, learn the clichés, avoid them, read what’s out there this year to see what’s grabbing readers – not to copy them or jump on a bandwagon, but so you get a sense of the modern crime novel and thriller. Then, if it’s your passion, go for it.

Above all, be honest. On the page you can break the laws of physics, but you must tell the emotional and moral truth.
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Visit Meg’s website for more information and to hear the title song for The Liar’s Lullaby. Leave a comment below and include an e-mail address if you want to enter the drawing for a free copy of Meg’s new novel.

There's No Secret Like an Old Secret

Mitch Silver

Why are “history mysteries” so popular? I’m talking about the ones that take place wholly in the past (think The Name of the Rose) as well as the contemporary thrillers in which people are obsessed with righting (or wronging) history—does Da Vinci ring a bell?
I think it has a lot to do with the evolution of secrets.

Think about it. Thanks to Access Hollywood and the internet and the ubiquitous cellphone with its increasingly ubiquitous camera, we know it the minute Lindsay Lohan either checks out of or back into rehab. Should a Congressman “innocently” send a couple of emails to his male pages or tap someone’s toes in a bathroom, we’ll see him crying crocodile tears of remorse in time for Sunday’s Meet the Press. The half-life of a secret today, about one news cycle, makes us yearn for that old-time secrecy. At least I do.

Could people keep more and better secrets way back when? Could they ever! Let’s take American Presidents for $200, Alex. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the most admired woman in the world, his wife Eleanor. How long did it take for the story to get out about FDR’s affair with Lucy Mercer, the one that led Eleanor to offer him a divorce in 1919? 35 years. Or People’s Exhibit 2: Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie. How long did it take for rumors about his Army driver, Kay Summersby, to emerge? A mere 28 years. And it’s not just us. Secrets involving the death of the Russian royal family are still coming out, 90 years later.

When I set out to write In Secret Service,
in which Ian Fleming reveals to posterity something nasty that happened in World War II and unintentionally jeopardizes the life of a contemporary Yale art history professor named Amy Greenberg, it was in the strongly-held belief that the older the secret, the juicier it is. (Hmm, I guess that explains The Clan of the Cave Bear.)

Possibly you’re thinking this is all so much hide-and-seek instead of literature, and possibly it is. In the 19th century, reading was thought to be part of one’s moral education. In most of the 20th, it at least took us out of ourselves and showed us how we were all part of the Human Condition. In the 21st century, while there are still literary novels that become bestsellers, the blockbusters are often thrill rides on paper. (Of course, Eco’s wonderful book was both.)

In a funny way, the thriller has to do more now than the classic 20th Century mystery: they just had to hook us to step into their world and keep us there, thinking our way step by step with Hercule Poirot or Perry Mason or Inspector Maigret. Today’s thriller has to recreate in the reader what the characters’ autonomic nervous systems are going through: confusion, hurt, love, anger, fear, joy…a literary lie detector apparatus with a direct hook-up from the character—in my case, Amy Greenberg—to us. Who said it has to do this? We did…the reading public.

Maybe this is the Me Generation coming home to roost, the triumph of feeling over thought. All I’m suggesting is that, in this mass market section of the fictional world, the direction has gone from moral uplift straight down—about 27” down, from the brain to the pit of the stomach, from the cerebral to the visceral…because the nature of secrets has changed. Today we’re not just plagued with the sexual peccadillos of our heroes; violence and its aftermath are on every tabloid cover and local news promo. Things that used to happen—and stay—in secret are now our lingua franca.

Those who choose the thriller over its cousin the straight detective mystery make “sensation” the word of the day. Remember, the thriller isn’t a thriller unless it puts the problem-solver…the uncoverer of secrets…into personal jeopardy, with the threats coming from all directions. I think when we pick up a story with an historical angle, we’re trying to have it both ways: give me the rush of a right-this-moment thriller and the authenticity of a decades- or centuries-old secret waiting to be revealed.

Next time, it might be fun to discover how tricky it is to write a book that mixes real historical characters with made-up ones. Oh, did I say tricky? I meant fascinating.


Mitch Silver has been an advertising writer for several of the big New York ad agencies. In Secret Service (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster)is his first thriller. You can visit him at www.MitchSilverBooks.com.

Some Like It Hot

Sandra Parshall

Do you take the temperature of the books you read?

I can’t help classifying crime novels by the amount of emotional heat they generate. Some stories have clever plots but require a minimum of personal involvement on the reader’s part. Those are the cool books. Others plunge you deep into the characters’ trouble-filled lives, and “hot” is the only way to describe the experience.

Cozies are, by their very nature, warm to slightly cool. Humor, especially when it borders on farce, has a cooling effect because it distances the story from the real world, where the events surrounding murder are seldom funny. That’s not a knock on cozies and humorous mysteries but an acknowledgment of their purpose: to entertain and divert without leaving the reader feeling wrung-out.

You might think thrillers would all be at the opposite temperature extreme, but that’s not the case. In techno-thrillers, the fate of the entire world may be at stake, but the story often remains an intellectual exercise rather than an emotional experience. For me, political suspense usually feels just as cold as a techno-thriller, which is why I avoid crime novels with flags on the covers.

The kind of book I enjoy most gets to me at a visceral level and lives up to its hype as “riveting from start to finish.” I don’t want to merely read about the characters’ ride through hell; I want to go along on the trip.

Tess Gerritsen at her best pulls me into her stories and leaves me breathless. Thomas Cook’s novels are quieter but intense and spellbinding.

Lisa Gardner and Greg Iles both write hot but include patches of cool writing that provide a few minutes of relief and relaxation before they heat up again.

Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine’s books are variable, but some of her psychological suspense novels, such as Going Wrong, The Lake of Darkness, and The Bridesmaid, are intensely creepy and gripping. Definitely hot, even though her prose is spare and might look cool at first glance.

P.D. James is usually cool all the way, although she has written a few passages from victims’ viewpoints that can raise the temperature of a book as well as the reader’s pulse rate.

Stephen White is a cool writer whose main character, a psychologist like White himself, is always thinking and reasoning.

Elizabeth George’s writing is warm when she’s in Barbara Havers’s viewpoint or that of a victim, but when she switches to Tommy Lynley or Simon St. James, the writing goes cold and cerebral even when they’re agonizing over the women they love.

When a book has a strong impact on me, I don’t usually slow down to wonder how the writer achieved that effect, but I’ll go back later to analyze it and, I hope, learn something I can use to make my own writing powerful. “Hot” writing explores primal emotions: love, hate, fear, jealousy, longing. Sensory details abound – readers always know how a character’s body, not just her mind, is reacting to an experience, and we always know how her world looks, smells, tastes, feels, sounds. Hot writing isn’t necessarily more violent than a cool story, but menace lurks everywhere, and when violence does erupt it is gut-wrenching and real, with nothing left out or sanitized. This is the kind of writing that reminds you how unpleasant murder is.

The genre of crime fiction has something for everybody. Books written with cool semi-detachment are as popular as those that shake you and leave you drained. Some readers, myself included, welcome an occasional cool book after a steady diet of high-emotion tales, and reading a warm cozy now and then resets my concept of what is normal so I don’t begin believing that everybody in the world is sick and vengeful. I’m not sure that many devoted cozy readers cross over to the dark side, though.

To each his own. But when I open the cover of a new book, nothing pleases me more than a blast of heat from its pages.

Do you see a cool/warm/hot pattern in your own reading?

Blurring the Line: Blending Horror with Mystery for a New Kind of Thriller

Jonathan Maberry (Guest Blogger)

So...why horror?

I get asked that a lot at book signings or lectures and in fan mail. Why do I write about the things that go bump in the night? Why do I write about monsters?

I mean...I read mostly mysteries and thrillers, most of what I’ve written over the last thirty years have been non-horror stuff: martial arts books, articles on parenting, experimental plays, sarcastic greeting cards. So why choose horror for my first novel? Why not make Ghost Road Blues a straight thriller?

The short answer is: well, it kind of just happened; but that doesn’t really say it. That doesn’t cut to the heart of it.

The long answer is the one that matters: I don’t write about monsters I write about people overcoming monsters. That’s a big difference.

The fantasy format –whether it is horror, sci-fi, a fable, whatever—has been used for storytelling since the beginnings of literature. The fantastic allows for a nice coating around the pill, and often that pill is a moral lesson, a social insight, a political statement, etc. I mean, let’s face it...it’s pretty darned unlikely that Odysseus actually fought a cyclops or fell prey to an island full of sirens.

Consider Poe. Had he just written dramas about obsession, paranoia, or the destructive power of sadness we would probably not remember him, eloquent as he was. However, because he wrote about black cats and purloined hearts and other macabre things his stories are treasured to this day and required reading in schools.

Look at TV. Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone and the original Star Trek show were vehicles used to tell stories about racism, social injustice, abuse, psychological disintegration, alienation, politics, and so on. Think about it, if Serling had pitched to the networks that he wanted to do a straight non-genre weekly drama about issues of social importance they’d have laughed him out of the room. And yet here we are, half a century after the Twilight Zone debuted and we still watch those shows, still collect the DVDs, still remember them. Genre storytelling is powerfully effective in this way.

When I was a teenager I read Richard Matheson’s landmark novels I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man. Two brilliant psychological thrillers about alienation, the structure of society, culture clashing, racial intolerance, and propaganda. Yet on the surface they’re stories about a guy living in a world where everyone else is a vampire and a tale of a man who shrinks a half an inch a day.

When I came up with the idea for Ghost Road Blues I wanted to take the same kind of approach to tell a story that shows how people confront darkness, whether it’s an external thing like a monster, a killer, a physical threat, or whether it’s internal, like temptation, corruption, lust, fear. I believe that evil, like goodness, is the result of choice. I don’t believe that the argument should begin and end with “nature versus nurture”. Both of those are contributing factors, but it is the choice a person makes that really matters; as does the way in which a person justifies that choice.

My characters in Ghost Road Blues and its sequels (Dead Man’s Song debuts from Pinnacle Books on July 3; Bad Moon Rising has just been completed) are all conflicted in one way or another, and they’re all damaged, they all have baggage. When each of them has to, at one point or another in the trilogy, confront who they are and what the world is asking of them, the choices they make at like shockwaves, impacting the lives around them.

I’ve had some real experience with darkness and hard choices. My childhood was a bona-fide nightmare and by all rights the things I experienced should have turned me into a sick and twisted person. But that’s not who I am. I made choices along the way to confront the darkness I was facing, and I took a stand against the monsters in my life. These were very hard choices but making the right ones both saved my life and gave it a more positive direction. There are a lot of people who had similar childhood experiences and made the wrong choice, or no choice at all, and the darkness consumed them.

I was lucky enough to be able to defeat my monsters. In my stories my characters have to face theirs. Some make the right choices, some make bad choices, but the whole story is about the process of choosing and its implications. That’s dangerous storytelling, and that’s what the horror genre does best. With horror...even with all the shadows around me, I’m home and damn happy to be here.

This is not to say that mystery formats don’t allow for this kind of storytelling. Look at Silence of the Lambs. That, too, is about monsters just as it’s about choices.

Will I stay in the horror genre? That’s hard to say. It’s certainly a nice place to be.

Jonathan Maberry’s Ghost Road Blues has been nominated for two Bram Stoker Awards (for Best First Novel and Novel of the Year).

Can Women Write Thrillers?

Sandra Parshall

“A testosterone-fueled thriller!”

How many times have you seen those words in a book review or ad?

And how many times have you seen a book described as “an estrogen-fueled thriller”?

Female authors who are accepted as thriller writers are still relatively rare. One reason may be that publishers, knowing a lot of men won’t read women authors, try to direct marketing of those authors’ work toward female readers. If a man writes an action-packed crime novel with sex in it, the book is called a testosterone-fueled thriller. If a woman writes an action-packed crime novel with sex in it, the book is likely to be labeled romantic suspense, guaranteeing that the majority of male readers won’t touch it with a barge pole.

I have no hard data to support this claim, but I’m going to say it anyway because I’ve seen it happen often enough to make me believe it’s true: agents, editors, and readers apply different standards to men’s and women’s books. A friend of mine wrote a thriller that was filled with action, murder, and plot twists. The protagonist was a strong female who knew how to protect herself and take out a bad guy when she needed to. Agents who read the manuscript either didn’t find the character’s actions believable or felt the book should be more interior, with bigger doses of the protagonist’s feelings. You know, more of a woman’s book. “I’ve considered rewriting to make her a man,” my friend says, “but then what would I do with the cute priest who’s the love interest? Make him a nun?”

Does a real difference exist between thrillers written by women and those produced by men? If you put a male name on a book, as some women writers do when they opt to use pseudonyms or their initials, will anybody be able to guess the author’s gender from the text? Do women overload their books with romance and family life? Do they use a softer tone and eschew graphic violence? Do their books focus only on female characters and their peculiarly female concerns?

If you think the answer is yes to all of the above, I have only this to say to you: P.J. Tracy. That’s a pseudonym for not just one woman but two, a mother-daughter writing team. I see a lot of similarities, beyond the Minnesota setting, between the Tracy novels and John Sandford’s Prey series, but I’m willing to bet that some male Sandford fans won’t read “Tracy” because they know the authors are a mother and a daughter.

While I’m naming names, consider Tess Gerritsen. True, her cop (Jane Rizzoli) and medical examiner (Maura Isles) are women, but Gerritsen also includes the viewpoint of Rizzoli’s husband, FBI agent Gabriel Dean, and her two women are as tough and businesslike as any male characters you’ll ever encounter. She doesn’t shy away from violence either. I wonder, though, how many men have never tried Gerritsen’s books because a woman’s name is on the covers and the two main characters are female. The fans she already has are enough to put her books on bestseller lists for a while. But the thrillers that make it onto the lists and stay there week after week, sometimes month after month, tend to be those written by men. The thrillers that get the most review attention are, with few exceptions, the “testosterone-fueled” kind.

Is this a holdover from the time when men ran the world and women were expected to smile and bake cookies? Or does something basic in human nature resist the idea of women writing about the darkest side of life? Why is it that some men simply cannot be entertained by a book if they know it was written by a woman?

I recently confessed that I avoid reading crime novels from foreign countries. I vowed to make more of an effort, because I realize I’m missing a lot of entertaining books. Men who won’t read thrillers by women are also missing some good stuff. If I thought any of those men were reading this blog, I would encourage them to be adventurous and give female thriller writers a try. The danger of estrogen contamination has been greatly exaggerated.