1.What drew you to writing? Why mysteries?

Family values–my parents met as journalists on the same newspaper and they were both college educated (my mother the first in her family) so reading and books were always part of my growing up. They both wanted to be writers, too, but life never gave them the chance. I can’t really remember not wanting to be a writer, I was writing short stories in third grade. As to mysteries, I’ve always liked mysteries and read them. Let’s be real, part of that was practical; it’s easier to sell a mystery both to publishers and to readers. Also, at the basis of most crime novels is death and dying, good and evil, and while it is possible to gloss over them, you can also really take a look at the kind of damage violence does, or how do we deal with grief and loss, and still be true to the genre. I like to point out to all my English major snob friends that Hamlet was a genre play, it has every convention of the revenge tragedy in it, from ghosts to body counts.

2. You’ve tackled some heavy issues in your work, including child abuse and violence against women. Was that a conscious choice, or did it just work within the context of the story?

I’ve never sat down and thought ‘I want to tackle child abuse in this next book.’ To me, issues are what we look at from a far away vantage point, but it’s people’s lives when you live the everyday reality of it. Besides, the best way to ‘argue’ an issue is to simply tell the story of how it affects one person’s life. As a writer I search for the conflict, the rough patches and seek to explore who is she (or he), how does she deal with this, what are the consequences of the consequences–for example, what are the myriad ways that having a rough growing up affect someone twenty years later? How many places does this seep into your life? I have consciously tried to weave the cases that Micky takes with hot spots in her emotional life, because that way they echo each other and it forces her emotional terrain to be one of the mysteries to be solved.

3. What writers have influenced your work? Do you admire?

Let me confess, I’m a reading slut. Books, magazines, the labels on toilet tissue . . . . Probably every writer I’ve read has influenced me–for good or ill. This will probably astound some people, but if I were stuck in that proverbial dessert island and could take one book, it would be Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. (Unless I could stretch it and take something like the collected works of Shakespeare.) I think I admire every writer who has the courage to put the words on the paper–it can be so hard and scary and frustrating. But admire isn’t quite the same as read–so, in no particular order except the conjunctions of my fevered brain: Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid, George Elliot, Dorothy Sayers, Barbara Wilson, Anton Chekov, Dorothy Allison, Charlotte Bronte, E. Annie Proulx, Kevin Allman, Euripedes, Octavia Butler, Anonymous, James Sallis, Doris Lessing, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Louise Erdrich, Hannah Arendt, and many others I can’t think of at the moment.

4. How does it feel to have Micky called a “lesbian Kinsey Millhone”?

It was meant as a compliment and I’ll take it as such, besides, it’s a hell of a lot better than some other things she could be called. Maybe someday some new detective will be called “the straight Micky Knight.”

5. There has been a lot of talk about lesbian fiction being marginalized. Has this been a problem for you? How do you feel about it?

The first editor that my agent approached about The Intersection of Law & Desire really liked the book, in fact, enough to offer what is called an overnight exclusive–which isn’t exactly overnight, but means that the publisher really wants the book and will make a quick deal in exchange for you not shopping the book to other publishers. The editor was interested, his boss was behind the book … we had all but signed the contract when word came back from on high that that particular publishing house was for sale and the company most likely to buy it wouldn’t want a lesbian book on their list. So they–pun intended–queered the deal. The potential buyer did have gay men’s books on their list. Is it harder to sell a lesbian book that a gay male book or a straight book? Yes. Is it easier than any other time to sell a lesbian book? Yes.

6. Mickey has grown and changed through the course of the series. Has this reflected changes in your own life?

Not in the least and of course. Micky’s struggles and changes do not directly reflect mine, but of course, my life influences my writing. I wasn’t interested in writing a static character, the Miss Marple who never changes from book to book, so in the first book Death by the Riverside, I started out with her as on the edge of being unlikable. And I knew that life was going to teach Mick a few lessons.

7. Your earlier Mickey novels had some terrific sex scenes in them, whereas in “Lost Daughters” there aren’t really any. Was this a conscious decision on your part?

Oh, right, give it away . . .that’ll cut my sales in half . . . . Sex scenes are hard to write, it’s next to impossible to convey the power of desire and touch with just written words. Let’s face it, how many ways can you say ‘came?’ I try not to write sex scenes about bodies touching bodies, but to use the sex scene to say something about the characters that really can’t be said any other way. In Law & Desire, for example, there were some sex scenes that I felt I had to write, because so much of that book was about struggling with sexuality and being sexual. Lost Daughters doesn’t have that same kind of need.

8. How much of you is in Micky?

That would be telling . . . . Actually, anyone who knows me would tell you that I’m not Micky and they’re right. That’s part of the fun of writing her; I get to live a whole different life from my own boring, mundane existence.