A lot of journalists are talented enough to write a mystery novel, and I would say that most of the top-end mystery writers actually started out as reporters. But there is more to it than just the writing; there's a learning process, and most journalists aren't willing to do it.

With most of my books, I'll actually go out and look at the setting. If you describe things carefully, it kind of makes the scene pop.

When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'

There are two worldviews in thriller writing: the paranoid view, like Chuck Logan's, that everything is inside a large clockwork. I like those books; they're intricate and thought out, but my view is that everything is chaotic and stupid. Chaos reigns, and civilized people do what they can to hold it back.