Once you reach this stage of any thriller—where the truth is rapidly being revealed to the reader and the final showdown is looming—it’s the author’s job to maintain the fast pace and suspense until the final page, and to throw in a couple of great twists.

Getting Lucinda back to Philadelphia gave the plot a full circle feeling that was quite intentional on my part. You have the sense that Lucinda is a sitting duck—but that a character as resourceful as she is won’t go down without a fight. What will she do? It was tricky to write scenes from her viewpoint and to show her vulnerability without tipping her hand to the reader.

Also, there were a lot of loose ends outside the Night Watchman plot that needed to be tied up here in short order: Cam’s story, Ava’s murder, Vic’s mission, Frank’s illness, Neal’s future, Lucinda’s relationship with Randy, and her family conflict.

The author’s challenge—as with any novel—is to keep all of those elements tied to the novel’s central themes. Here, those themes revolve around trust, forgiveness, risk, a ticking clock, and, of course, darkness and light.

Early on, we learned that Lucinda cops to being afraid of only one thing in the world: the dark. This was interpreted in a literal sense by Lucinda herself, by those who know her, and by the Night Watchman. And of course, it’s literally true—she sleeps with the light on.

But as the novel progressed, her fear of the dark proved—I hope!—to be metaphoric. She’s a woman who, like so many of us, fears the unknown, and who tries to maintain control in her life through avoidance. She’s a control freak for whom things have spun out of control. Now we see the irony that in a sense, she’s been living in the dark for all this time—and that allowing herself to venture into the unknown ultimately enables her character to step into the light at last.

Our heroine is flawed—and thus, human. We needed to see her grow and change on a personal level through the course of the story, and to be accountable for where she is in her life—and where she wants to go from here.

As Lucinda comes to terms with her past and her relationship with her mother, there are gray areas—just like in real life. I worked hard to make these scenes feel organic, and for the reader to relate, on some level, to both women. Lucinda’s mother isn’t the “bad guy” and Lucinda isn’t the “good guy” here. That would be boring. They’ve both made mistakes.

Even as the pieces of her personal life were falling into place, her peril was escalating. It was time to shake things up a little in order to keep Lucinda one step ahead of the killer, and for the author to stay one step ahead of the reader. And of course, the truly frightening thing here is that the Night Watchman—who thrives on control as much as our heroine does—remains a master puppeteer almost to the very last page.

Good triumphs over evil in a satisfying suspense novel. That’s a given. But because this book was a bit of a departure for me, the Night Watchman’s final scene became a departure as well.

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