Archives for January 2017

‘Right Behind You,’ A Conversation with Lisa Gardner

January 31, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Lisa Gardner is the bestselling author of eighteen previous novels, including her FBI profiler books which have been one of her most popular series.

Right Behind You opens with a brother and sister who have escaped from a childhood of abuse only to be separated by a foster care system after their parents were killed. At 13, Sharlah May Nash is about to be adopted by retired FBI profiler Pierce Quincy and his partner, Rainie Conner. When a double murder is reported at a local gas station, the killer is identified as Telly, Sharlah’s older brother who hasn’t been seen or heard from since their parents’ murder. It seems he’s begun a killing spree and has fled into the Oregon wilderness. Sharlah questions if Telly is truly a killer, and needs to discover the truth. She also wants to find out what really happened in the murkiness of their violent childhoods.

Right Behind You depicts, among other things, what criminal profiling is about. What exactly does a profiler do?

A profiler attempts to ascertain the identity of a criminal based on a series of probabilities and markers. A profiler can look at a crime scene and work backwards to determine the most likely psychology behind the person who committed the crime. From studies of serial killers—which serves as something of a data base—a profiler can begin sorting out probabilities such as the age, gender, occupation and living locale of the killer. So, of the seven billion people on the planet, the population of possible perpetrators is now reduced to let’s say, two-hundred people in a limited geographic area. It can be a great help to the police.

Right Behind You involves the search for a spree killer. How does a spree killer differ from a mass murderer or a serial killer?

A serial killer kills more than three people in multiple locations over a longer period of time. A mass murderer kills multiple people in one location in a single explosion of violence. A spree killer, on the other hand, is essentially, a combination of both of these murderers: there are multiple fatalities in different locations in a short period of time. One of the hallmarks of a spree killer is that often, the first killing occurs close to him. It might be a domestic situation or workplace violence. There’s a great deal of bottled-up rage and in that final explosion, the killer does what he wanted to do all along, namely, pull that trigger. They basically have a psychotic break. They then become a danger to anyone unfortunate enough to cross their paths. That makes it a time-sensitive case because after that first killing spree, all bets are off.

The novel also describes different types of guns. How did you become so familiar with weapons?

Well, I live in New Hampshire [Laughter]. Most of my neighborhood is heavily armed [More laughter]. I owe a great deal of gratitude to my husband and my thirteen-year-old daughter. They’re both experienced target shooters. They not only walk me through those scenes but provide me with hands-on demonstrations. Guns are one thing I never quite get right. When I’ve gone shooting, I must confess, I don’t like the noise.

There’s lots of insight about troubled children, youthful offenders and childhood trauma in Right Behind You. Tell us how you learned so much about these compelling issues.

A personal theme that runs through all my books is what it means to be a survivor. It’s what Sharlah and Telly are struggling with in this novel. They struggled to survive as very young children, and that struggle still defines who they are.

I’ve been involved for thirteen years with local child services providers where we work with special needs kids, troubled children, and at-risk kids. Talking to social workers, knowing families who’ve gone through adoption, and who have fostered and then adopted kids with very troubled pasts has given me a background in all these issues.

Of course, trauma doesn’t evaporate just because a child finds a forever-home. It burrows deep beneath the skin. Even if a child is a survivor who wants to feel better, there’s no magic that can make the trauma disappear. Hearing those stories and learning about those journeys has made me appreciate how much love and work it takes to foster and adopt these kids. That’s what Rainie and Quincy deal with. They’re experienced profilers who have seen so much abnormal human behavior, and because of the starkness of their job, want to help save a life, which is why they adopted Sharlah.

It involves an enormous amount of day-in, day-out work. I have so much admiration for the foster families and adoptive parents who make it work for those children.

It’s clear you’ve done research for this novel. Your website has some great information about the do’s and don’ts of research. Will you share some of that with us?

When I was starting out as a novelist, I did an enormous amount of research for my first suspense book. I threw it all in the book. My editor at the time said it was ‘too much.’ It wasn’t entertainment. So, I heavily edited the manuscript. When I resubmitted it, she said, ‘There’s nothing in there.’ It was too sparse. Ever since then, I’ve been a ‘Goldilocks’ writer: the first draft has too much, the second has too little, but the third draft will be just right.

Of course, learning is easy, and I talk with experts, but I don’t want to snow the reader with too much research detail. I love the Hemingway quote: ‘You must learn the glacier to write the tip.’

Your novels depict great villains—or as you’ve put it, ‘The Diabolical Prima Donna.’ Tell us about that.

I think people love a good villain. The point of my essay is that in so many books and movies, the villain is the one who sticks with you. For me, a great suspense novel involves cat and mouse. If your detective is the cat, you’ve got to give him a worthy mouse. Otherwise, there’s no tension and the novel lacks excitement. You want a villain just as clever as your detective. I also think the villain must be complicated and have some compelling attributes. For instance, Ted Bundy stands out as the ultimate, real-life bogey man. He would slaughter poor young girls, yet wouldn’t drive an uninsured car. He was polite and adhered to nearly all of society’s rules of etiquette and propriety. That kind of complexity made him interesting.

What, if anything, do you read while writing a novel?

I read all the time. I even read the Cheerios box. I have a thirteen-year-old daughter who’s a huge reader and has introduced me to a number of amazing YA series. Many of them, like The Hunger Games, emphasize kick-ass heroines. I love reading suspense novels and especially enjoy reading books by Karin Slaughter, Tess Gerritsen, Joseph Finder, Lee Child, Harlan Coben, and my favorite new series right now is one by Greg Hurwitz. It’s sort of like Jason Bourne meets Jack Reacher.

I should say that while I’m writing a novel, I won’t read anything similar in tone or subject to what I’m writing. I think I would worry about my work being influenced or even polluted by the other novel.

What’s coming next from Lisa Gardner?

We last talked about Find Her. The reception for that novel was so good that Flora Dane, the survivor of having been held captive for four-hundred-seventy days, is coming back in my next novel.

Congratulations on writing Right Behind You, a gripping novel Harlan Coben called ‘taut psychological suspense, an intricate mystery, emotionally devastating, ultimately empowering.’ I concur with Harlan Coben, completely.

Mark Rubinstein’s latest book is Bedlam’s Door: True Tales of Madness and Hope, a medical/psychiatric memoir.

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‘The Rising,’ A talk with Heather Graham and Jon Land

January 17, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Heather Graham is an internationally renowned author of more than 150 novels and novellas. She has been honored with nearly every award available to contemporary writers.

Jon Land is the USA Today bestselling author of more than forty books, both novels and non-fiction, including the critically acclaimed series featuring Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong.

The Rising features Alex Chin, a classic, All-American football hero and his tutor Samantha Dixon who hopes to turn her NASA internship into a career. A football accident leads Alex to the hospital and suddenly, everything goes awry.

Alex’s doctor is murdered, as are his Chinese parents who adopted him at infancy. After the murders, Alex must flee, and Samantha refuses to leave him. They race desperately to stay ahead of the attackers, trying to learn why Alex is being hunted. The answer lies buried in his past, and it’s a secret his parents died trying to protect. Adopted soon after birth, Alex never knew the reason his birth parents abandoned him. Revelations await, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

The Rising has elements of different genres. Tell us about that.

Heather: I had great parents who read everything. One was a lover of the Gothic novel and the other loved Edgar Allen Poe. I grew up reading everything. The notion of something being strictly one genre was a surprise to me when I started writing. That concept has changed over time, and now many popular books straddle various genres.

Jon: I think when we conceived of collaborating on a book like this, the idea of melding genres and having young heroes as protagonists was a natural thing. We didn’t want to do precisely what either one of us is known for. We both wanted to write something neither one of us ever attempted. We wanted to assemble what each of us does best and put it into a new package. My first agent said to me, ‘If you know the characters, you can write anything.’ We got to know Alex and Samantha so well that we knew we had these great protagonists who were about to sacrifice everything for something far bigger than themselves.

Heather: We also have an editor who loves NASA and the concept of space exploration and the future. He arranged for us to tour the Goddard Space Center where we spent time with the astronauts.

Jon: The kind of science we’re writing about—the Robert Heinlein kind of story, involves a wish to go back to the roots of storytelling and science fiction. It’s like Stranger in a Strange Land. It’s like I Robot.

Heather: We’re all creatures in our galaxy, but on this planet, we don’t really get along very well. If you’re murdered by your neighbor or by an alien from outer space, the result is the same. The story relates not only to space, but to basic human foibles on earth.

Jon: Yes, science fiction storytelling has always served as a metaphor for what’s going on in the world, and that’s what The Rising does. Among many other things, this novel concerns xenophobia and the wish to isolate ourselves from outsiders who are automatically deemed to be ‘bad.’ Whether it’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or Bladerunner, the science fiction genre uses imagination to reveal basic truths about our lives.

In a sense, part of the novel is about globalism and multiculturalism. When you think back to the original The Day the Earth Stood Still, it was a film about different worlds coming together and the problems coming together can pose for people. And that’s in a sense, what a good part of this novel is about, aside from being a thriller and a science fiction novel.

As a collaborative effort, how did you go about writing The Rising?

Heather: We went back and forth. At first, the biggest problem was it was sometimes difficult to make critical comments or suggestions to each other because we liked each other so much. Once we got past that, we did fine. We’re very lucky because it was a lot of fun. We talked about each section, sent it back and forth, and the story moved on.

Jon: We’d done so much talking about the concept before actually beginning to write, it was less seat-of-the-pants writing and it went very smoothly.

Heather: It’s been a great collaboration because we melded our styles of writing and storytelling by finding common ground. Also, Jon is brilliant with tech, and I’m not. So, we each brought different strengths to the work.

You’re two of the most prolific authors I know. How do you account for your productivity?

Heather: I have five children and they were very expensive. [Laughter]. When I started writing, I had no clue about what I was doing. I tried many things and didn’t make any money. I was writing the kind of fiction that wasn’t what I really wanted to write. I then realized my strength was writing novels with murder, mystery and mayhem. I learned if I was going to survive as a writer, I had to produce a lot of books. I learned to simply sit down and write. And write some more. The notion of having a deadline keeps the fires burning.

Jon: For me, it’s really about chasing the dream. My dream is to be more successful than I’ve ever been. So, I write and then write more.

Heather: I would also say I can’t imagine not writing. It’s what I absolutely adore doing. If I won the Lottery, would I stop writing? No.

If you weren’t a writer now, what would you be doing?

Heather: I majored in theater and performed at dinner-theater for years. I was a backup singer, too. I started writing because going to auditions became too expensive. Auditions and dinner theater involved hours and hours, and I wasn’t making enough money to make up for the time I was missing out with my children. That was when I began staying home and writing.

Jon: I was headed towards law school in college. I was bitten by the writing bug and my life changed. I’d probably have become a lawyer. A trial lawyer is also creating a narrative for the jury, and being a writer is sort of like being a lawyer without worrying about what the other side does. For me, the readers are the jury.

It seems to me a sequel should and will be coming for The Rising. Is that true?

Heather: Yes, most definitely. [Laughter].

Aside from a sequel to The Rising, what’s coming next from each of you?

Heather: Last year, Flawless was published. It will be followed this winter by Perfect Obsession.

Jon: I’m half-way through the ninth book in the Caitlin Strong series. It’s called Strong to the Bone.

Congratulations on writing The Rising, a genre-bending and gripping thriller involving murder, adventure and science fiction that’s received abundant and well-deserved praise from Meg Gardiner, James Rollins, Lisa Scottoline, Douglas Preston, Sandra Preston, and others.

Mark Rubinstein’s latest book, Bedlam’s Door: True Tales of Madness and Hope, is a medical/psychiatric memoir.

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Hearing Voices, Killing People

January 12, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

The media are brimming with reports about Esteban Santiago, the 26-year-old man who opened fire at the Fort Lauderdale airport, killing five people and wounding eight. Federal officials are investigating whether the gunman was mentally disturbed and heard voices in his head telling him to commit violent acts.

Mr. Santiago was reported to have walked into an Anchorage F.B.I. office in November 2016, and made disturbing remarks prompting officials to urge him to seek mental health care. He was reported to have appeared “agitated and incoherent,” saying “his mind was being controlled by a U.S. intelligence agency.” When he visited the F.B.I. office, his statements were described as “disjointed.” Interviewing agents contacted local authorities who took him to a medical facility for evaluation.

Since the shootings, reports have surfaced saying Mr. Santiago was discharged in August from the Alaska Army National Guard for “unsatisfactory performance.” He was noted to have been deployed to Iraq in 2007, where he spent a year clearing roads of improvised explosives and maintaining bridges. He did not see combat and was awarded a Meritorious Unit Commendation.

As described by the New York Times, his brother noted “that Esteban had recently been hallucinating and was receiving psychological treatment.”

This horrific case highlights matters which have recently received a good deal of focus: gun laws, air travel safety, mental health issues, terrorism, and the role of wartime combat in precipitating debilitating symptoms of mental disorders, foremost among them being PTSD.

Alternately, officials are considering the possibility that Mr. Esteban may have been inspired by terrorist groups, including the Islamic State.

As a psychiatrist, I contend Mr. Esteban is not suffering from PTSD, nor was he radicalized by ISIS. Instead, Mr. Esteban developed a serious psychiatric disorder: Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type. What is known thus far is that the onset of his symptoms—delusions and hallucinations—occurred in his 20s, which is the usual age schizophrenic symptoms make their appearance. It’s also clear that he was hearing voices—experiencing auditory hallucinations—and they were command hallucinations, ordering him to commit acts of violence.

It’s also clear from reports as early as November 2016 that he was “agitated and incoherent” when he appeared at the F.B.I. office. Such disjointed speech is typical of many schizophrenic patients in the process of decompensating.

Lastly, most revealing is the New York Times’ report describing Mr. Santiago as believing “that his mind was being controlled by a U.S. intelligence agency.”

A belief that one’s mind is being controlled by some outside force, or evil thoughts are being inserted into one’s head, is a classic symptom of severe schizophrenia.

Understandably, law enforcement officials are trying to determine if Mr. Santiago was inspired by terrorism, just as some might conclude his service in Iraq brought on mental illness and his violent actions.

But such thinking is misguided.

Schizophrenia, in any of its forms, is a severe mental disorder in which people abnormally interpret reality. Schizophrenia often involves a combination of hallucinations, delusions, disordered thinking and bizarre behavior that impairs daily functioning.

While it’s not known precisely what causes schizophrenia, researchers believe a combination of genetics, brain chemistry and environment contributes to the development of the disorder.

Problems with certain naturally occurring brain chemicals, including the neurotransmitters dopamine and glutamate, may feed into schizophrenia. Neuroimaging studies show differences in the brain structure of people with schizophrenia compared to normal brains. While the significance of these anomalies isn’t yet fully understood, it indicates schizophrenia is a brain disease.

It’s incorrect to point to Mr. Santiago’s army service and to terrorism as “causes” of his illness. Nor did they precipitate his condition. He was a compromised individual who was in the process of a slow and inexorable downward drift into madness. In his decompensated state, he may have recruited the Islamic State or recent news items about the U.S. intelligence community into his thinking; but these external issues did not cause, bring about, worsen, or precipitate a psychiatric illness already beginning to express itself within Mr. Santiago’s disturbed mind. Though his brother maintains that Mr. Santiago was in “psychological treatment,” it’s common for such patients to be non-compliant with their medication regimens. Without proper treatment, Mr. Santiago’s malignant illness culminated in the horror of the Fort Lauderdale airport massacre.

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‘The Travelers,’ A Conversation with Chris Pavone

January 10, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

‘The Travelers,’ A Conversation with Chris Pavone

Chris Pavone, formerly a book editor, is the author of two previous New York Times bestsellers, The Accident and The Expats, and winner of the Edgar and Anthony Awards. His latest novel is The Travelers.

The Travelers features Will Rhodes, his wife Chloe, and Malcomb, his boss at the magazine Travelers at which Will is an international correspondent writing about food, wine, foreign cultures, celebrities and expats. But Will has no idea of the secret agendas of some people, including those of his wife and Malcomb. When Will travels to Capri, Bordeaux, Paris, London and Argentina, he finds himself at the center of a dangerous web, one imperiling his marriage, career, and his life.

The Travelers takes readers from the beaches of France, to Barcelona, New York, Argentina and to Iceland, all places hiding a dark story of surveillance, lies and espionage. How did you acquire so much knowledge about clandestine espionage operations?

[Laughter] I don’t think I’ve acquired much knowledge about espionage.

I imagined this novel as a story about people who don’t really know for whom they work. We all live in a universe in which we’re either asked to or are forced to accept certain premises about our employment without having the opportunity to verify them. There are some types of employment where it’s perfectly clear for whom you’re working: for instance, teaching in a public school, your boss is the principal, who works for the Board of Education which is publicly funded, it’s very clear.

It’s less clear in the private sector. We go to work every day and often don’t know who owns the company or what their real agenda may be. We don’t truly know what kind of contribution we’re making to some hidden end-game. It took me a decade of working for a large company before I had the curiosity to find out who actually owned that company.

That experience became the premise of this novel. Espionage is somewhat incidental to the story I wanted to tell.

In most espionage novels, the characters risk their lives trying to save somebody, or while protecting a nation from some threat. In The Travelers, that’s not what’s going on. I used espionage as a device to heighten the characters’ personal dramas.

Self-interest thrusts the characters into conflict with one another. Deceit in both personal and business relationships results in their lives spinning out of control.

Speaking of conflicts, I loved your depictions of the inner workings of various characters’ minds, especially Will’s and his boss, Malcomb’s. Will you talk about that?

I try to construct each of my novels around one central theme—core tensions shared by the characters. In The Travelers, everyone is defined by his or her relationship to work. I put each character on a different rung of the ladder: from the lowliest assistant to a powerful man in the world of media.

Will occupies a middle rung; while Malcom, as the editor, is perched at the top.

Their seemingly comfortable and enviable lives have been intertwined for many years, and they consider each other friends; but certain tensions are added to the mix when Will finds himself working for Malcom. That tension is central to the drama in this book.

One man is lying to the other about something critically important to the other.

We’re not worried someone’s going to get killed, but rather, we’re worried someone will be found out.

Much of The Travelers orbits around marital secrets, as did your novel, The Expats. Will you talk about secrets and lies in a marriage?

I think secrets are a compelling issue for a novel to explore. Most people are married and I don’t think Im going too far out on a limb by saying no one is completely truthful about everything. What if a particular lie your spouse is telling you has enormous consequences ?

What if he or she isn’t who they claim to be ? What if what they actually do for a living is not what you’ve been led to believe they do? What if you’re waking up each morning next to someone who at least in part, is a stranger?

Although I don’t have those concerns about my wife [Laughter]; at times, I do have those irrational thoughts about people in general. And, I don’t think I’m alone in that regard. So, I like that kind of tension in a novel. It allows the reader to root for both sides: on one hand, you want the person to be found out, but you also want the secrets to remain intact.

I was impressed by your rich descriptions of even the most quotidian things: an airport, a party, a yacht, a room, or a building’s basement or lobby. How would you describe your writing style?

I think my writing style is sensual. I attempt to engage all the reader’s sense memories when I’m writing descriptive passages. I use descriptions to set a mood and drive the reader to expect or worry about something. It helps to engage every sense—not just seeing things, but tasting, smelling, and hearing things. I try getting as much of that onto the page as is reasonable. I try to engage readers so it feels like they’re actually there, in the scene.

Who are the writers who have influenced your own writing?

That’s such a hard question to answer. The truth is that I’m influenced in some way by practically everything I read, and I read an enormous amount of fiction. I’m constantly taking notes on things that occur to me while I’m reading someone else’s book. The jottings have nothing to do with the book I’m reading, but something I’m reading triggers my own imagination in a completely different direction. There’s very little that makes me want to write more and better than my being immersed in a very good book.

What do you love about the writing life?

I absolutely love writing. As a kind of labor that people will pay you to do, I can’t imagine anything better. I love making things up and my favorite part of writing is when creating the first draft of a novel. I love making decisions and finding new plot twists. I love the invention. The one thing I don’t like is that too frequently, I get ideas in the middle of the night. I have to write them down or I won’t remember them. Then, I can’t get back to sleep because my imagination is all fired-up.

What’s coming next from Chris Pavone?

I’m writing a sequel to my first book, The Expats. This one is called The Paris Diversion and features some of the characters from the first novel.

Congratulations on writing The Travelers, a propulsive, richly imagined, insightful, literary thriller that had me guessing all the way to the last pages.

Mark Rubinstein’s latest book is Bedlam’s Door: True Tales of Madness and Hope, a medical/psychiatric memoir.

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