Day 1 The Characters

I loved these characters—not just Lucinda and Vic, but the rest of the cast as well. Because some of them had appeared in DYING BREATH, I was bound by certain constraints—another departure for me, as my thrillers have always been standalone.

OUR HEROINE
Some of the heroine’s characteristics are drawn from my own, and some are very much the opposite. Her aversion to healthy food and her ferocious sweet tooth are not things I share—nor is her fear of the dark. Some similarities between us: the car seat beside me is frequently cluttered with CD cases, empty cups, etc.. The first thing I do when I get out of bed in the morning is head for the coffee maker. And I like to think that I’m entirely self-sufficient, so I’m not good at asking for—or admitting I need—help.

EMERGENCE OF THE “NIGHT WATCHMAN”
When I wrote the book, we had been to the Netherlands Antilles island of Curacao a few months earlier, and I had fallen in love with it. I really wanted to set a few scenes there, and intended to. But quite a bit of the opening chapter involving Jimmy wound up on the cutting room floor when I re-wrote the book at the halfway point.

That rewrite was necessary—as so many of my rewrites are--because of a fluke in my personal life that caused me to rethink the direction of my novel.

What happened was this: I watched a movie.

In our house, these days, that’s a revolutionary occurrence. Long ago, when our kids were younger and I (ironically) got a lot more sleep than I do now, Mark and I loved to spend Saturday nights curled up on the couch with Blockbuster rentals and takeout sushi. Flash forward about a decade to a modern-day Saturday night: if we aren’t shuttling our kids to their social engagements or out for the evening ourselves (our own social engagements no longer limited by babysitter availability), I can’t sit down for much longer than a half hour without falling asleep. I can usually make it through 21 commercial-less minutes of a tivo’d sitcom or 40-odd commercial-less minutes of a tivo’d drama, but an entire movie? Forget about it.

Still, Mark keeps buying DVDs and tivo-ing movies he thinks I’d like, fueled by nostalgia and the hope that one Saturday night, we will recapture our old lifestyle. I never thought it would happen…but it actually did, one weekend last fall, when thanks to extra caffeine or maybe an extra hour’s sleep that morning, I felt awake enough to commit to an entire movie.

Mark eagerly grabbed the remote and scrolled through the choices. Among them was the thriller Zodiac. For me, a no-brainer. I love a good serial killer thriller, I love Robert Downey Jr., and being something of an unsolved crimes buff, I was very familiar with the true story behind the film.

As the movie unfolded, I was mesmerized—and inspired. I began to re-imagine the thriller I was writing as darker, and more complex. I wondered what would happen if I allowed my Night Watchman character to emerge from the shadows and play a more evil, active role in the plot—still veiled, of course. I wanted to know—and show—more about what made him tick.

DOING JUSTICE TO “VIC”
The same was true with my retired FBI agent-turned author, Vic Shattuck, who played a minor role in my original vision of the story. Allowing him to become more intrinsic to the plot would be no easy task. I knew a little about FBI profiling, having read John Douglas’s fascinating books on the topic, but not enough to do justice to Vic as a major character.

If I wanted to take my book into a new direction, I would have to do my homework. And with the book already late to my editor, I was under the gun.

Sunday morning, I got online and reserved a bunch of books through my local library system. Then I emailed a couple of my author friends to see if anyone had an FBI source who would be willing to talk to me. As luck would have it, Beverly Barton did. She put me in touch with retired agent Bill Rasmussen on Monday, picked up a stack of library books on Tuesday, and from there on in, I was obsessed.

Bill was incredible. He answered a barrage of daily questions, some incredibly trite-sounding. Through him, Vic began to come alive and the FBI elements became more three-dimensional as I worked hard with Bill to get everything just right. I went back and wrote Vic into the beginning of the book, and those new scenes became a springboard into others. The process was like taking apart a half-assembled puzzle—one that has more than one solution—and painstakingly rebuilding it piece by piece.

It was that feeling that led me to give Lucinda a reoccurring dream about an unfinished puzzle. That element was written into the story as I was nearing the end!

Please leave you comments or questions below (no spoilers!)

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