This month, the Mysterious Corner is very proud to present an interview with author Lisa Gardner.  Lisa, thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions for us.

Deborah Hern:  For readers who may not have discovered your books yet, please tell us a bit about yourself.

Lisa Gardner:  I’m a New York Times best-selling author of suspense.  I like dark, disturbing books with dark, disturbing characters where you never know what’s going to happen next.  I’m also a chocoholic.

DH:  How did you decide to become an author?  Was it a life-long dream?  Or something that came along later?

LG:  I’ve definitely always wanted to be a writer.  I don’t think it’s something you do, but someone you are.  In my case, writing was considered a little strange as I was raised by two accountants to pursue the practical things in life.  Starving for your art, living beneath the poverty line—not very practical.  So I did the conservative thing and became a business consultant.  But writing continued to call to me, and I found I spent more time writing books than preparing presentations.  Finally, I took the plunge.  I have to say, becoming a full-time writer is the best thing I ever did.

DH:  You began your career writing romances under the name Alicia Scott.  Did you enjoy writing romances?

LG:  I loved writing romances!  My mother is a huge romance reader, so at an early age she turned me onto such great historical romance authors as M.M. Kaye, Kathleen Woodiwiss, Jude Devereaux and Laura London.  Then she started reading contemporaries through Silhouette Intimate Moments.  I not only enjoyed those novels, too, but the shorter length and tighter focus made me consider trying to write one.  The summer before I went off to college, I drafted my first SIM.  It was absolutely horrible.  But two years and four rewrites later, I sold the novel to Silhouette.  My mother was very proud.  J

DH:  What made you decide to switch over to mysteries?

LG: I had mysteries even in my romances; I’ve always liked potent combination of romantic suspense.  Thirteen books later, however, I found that the suspense was taking over more and more of my story.  So migrating to straight suspense seemed like the logical thing to do.  I think as an artist, you have to keep yourself fresh.

DH:  You’ve obviously done a lot of research for your books.  Is that something you enjoy?

LG:  Frankly, I prefer research to writing hands down.  You go to interesting places, talk to interesting people, and learn interesting ways of committing murder.  What’s not to love?

DH:  Do you begin by researching a location?  Or the science of the crime?

LG:  Depends on the book.  For The Killing Hour, I knew I wanted to set the book at the FBI Academy in Quantico .  So I started by visiting Quantico and interviewing some of the New Agents.  That was loads of fun.  But TKH also features a very complex killer: a man who kidnaps two women, killing the first and leaving her as a  “road map” to finding the second woman, who has been abandoned in a geographically treacherous proper.  Figuring out the appropriate clues that would lead to the second woman involved a great deal of science.  I’m deeply indebted to a whole group of experts from the U.S. Geological Survey team in Richmond , VA , who helped me choose interesting crime scenes, then helped me identify the best clues to lead an investigator there.

DH:  Do you find that it’s more fun/interesting to write the bad guys in a mystery novel than the good guys?  Does that present more of a challenge?

LG:  Actually, I really like writing about the protagonists.  Maybe because my good guys are never too good.  They want to be good.  They strive to be better people.  But they have enough faults and rough edges that they’re never going to be sainthood material.  What sets them apart is their courage to keep fighting the good fight, even though their cynical worldview tells them they’ve probably lost the war.

DH:  You have several novels that are not quite a series, but connected.  Did you originally plan things this way?

LG:  I never plan.  Book ideas pop into my head.  Some work out nicely for my favorite characters, some demand new characters.  I definitely enjoy returning to characters such as Rainie and Quincy, because they’re near and dear to my heart.  But I also like the challenge of generating new characters who feel like old friends.

DH:  In your Acknowledgements, you mention that someone won a cameo appearance in this novel as part of a charity auction.  Can you explain how that came to be?

LG:  As a fundraiser, I agreed to auction off a “character.”  The winning bid would be entitled to have his or her name in a book.  I’ve actually taken this a step further now, and on my website, www.LisaGardner.com, you can enter the “Kill a Friend, Maim a Buddy” Sweepstakes.  Basically, you nominate the name of your choice (yourself, a friend, whomever) to die in my next novel.  This is our second annual sweepstakes.  Can I say that the turn out for the first contest was absolutely stupendous?  Apparently, there are a lot of people out there in need of a grand death.

DH:  What’s next for you?

LG:  I just finished my next novel, Alone, which will be available January 11, 2005 from Bantam Books.  It features a new cast of characters, including a police sniper, Bobby Dodge, who opens the novel by killing a man.  But did he kill the right man?

Bobby is one the neatest characters I’ve done in a long time.  He considers himself a good police officer, he considers himself a good person.  But once you pull the trigger, you can never take that moment back.  The press views him differently, his fellow police officers view him differently, his girlfriend views him differently.  He is now a killer, and that’s a lot for any man to bear.

Then as the questions mount, he’s face with a very disturbing possibility—that far from this being a routine shooting, he might have been set up by the dead man’s lovely widow to commit the perfect murder. 

Lisa, thanks so much!  I’m already looking forward to your next novel!