| 1)
What first made you want to write a crime novel? |
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| I didn’t! I simply wanted to write a novel. Who doesn’t? Then the book I actually was not a crime novel. It was a much quieter, more realistic book about a marriage under the strain of moving abroad, and a woman’s transition to staying at home with children. But that manuscript bored me! So I made it more and more complicated until it had evolved into a double-cross-filled espionage thriller. |
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| 2)
You have experience of living as an expat. Is this where the idea came from? |
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Yes. I think expat life is filled with rich material for any number of different genres - there’s adventure and travel, there’s reinvention and adultery,
high finance and espionage. It was tough to choose which of these themes to explore. So I sort of used all of them.
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| 3)
‘The Expats’ has quite an intricate plot to it. Did you have the whole plot before you started writing or was it constantly evolving during the writing process? |
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| I worked on the manuscript for a while before I fully decided what type of book it would be, and what would happen; at the beginning, I was sketching characters and situations, but not really working on a very compelling plot. Once I made the decision to turn the book into an espionage thriller, I opened a fresh document and plotted out the whole book, using a very detailed outline. Then I kept revising that outline while I wrote, as new opportunities for twists presented themselves. |
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| 4)
You use a present timeline and a past timeline in ‘The Expats’. Was this a difficult or easy method to use when writing your debut novel? |
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| It was definitely a challenge to figure out how to space the timelines in a way that wouldn’t be confusing, as well as how to pace the plot revelations so they weren’t so close as to be overwhelmingly clumped together, nor so far apart as to make the book boring. I was a book editor for fifteen years before I wrote ‘The Expats’, and I now have to admit that it’s much harder than it used to look from my editor’s desk! |
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| 5)
I felt that some characters were ambiguous and others not sure what side they fell which I thought subtle and worked well in keeping me interested. Did any of the characters change their roles as the book developed? |
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| The book revolves around this premise: absolutely no one—from the bit players up to the main characters—is who he or she at first appears to be. They are all morally ambiguous, and not necessarily in the ways that you first suspect. So the reader’s understanding of the characters evolves over the course of reading the book, and the characters themselves also evolve. |
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| 6)
Where do you think you will go with your next novel? Do you like the idea of regular characters or will your next book contain a different set of people? |
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| I love the idea of regular characters—a big rich world filled with interconnected people—but not particularly for my second novel, which will indeed be populated by a (mostly) different set of people. |
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| 7)
Was any part of ‘The Expats’ based on any real life events? |
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| Yes, quite a bit. Like my protagonist, I left behind my career in America to follow my spouse’s job to Luxembourg, where for the first time in my life I tended to the household and the children, finding my way amongst strangers, in a world where I didn’t speak the language or know the customs, while my wife worked constantly and travelled incessantly . . . This setup of ‘The Expats’ is the same as the setup of my life, with the genders reversed. And even some of the conversations in the book are near-verbatim replications of real discussions. On the other hand, all the action that’s central to the plot is fiction. As is everything about spying and theft. (But of course that’s what a spy or a thief would say, isn’t it?). |
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| 8)
You got some amazing advance quotes from the likes of Patricia Cornwell and John Grisham. How does this make you feel getting such praise from these guys? |
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| I’m ecstatic about the book’s early reception among people who write in the same general arena—those you mention as well as Olen Steinhauer and Christopher Reich, John Connolly and Rosamund Lupton. These are people who know what it’s like to try to write this type of convoluted book, and it feels wonderful that they think my effort isn’t horrible. |
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| 9)
If you had a gun to your head (only figuratively speaking) who would you have play your main protagonist, Kate Moore? |
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| Sorry, but you’d have to put a nonfigurative gun to my head to get an answer. For one, I don’t want to risk offending whoever might end up in the role! (The film rights have been optioned.) And also because there’s a vague face in my imagination, but that face doesn’t match anyone in the real world. So I’m relieved that the decision will never be mine, because it’s not one I could make. |
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| 10)
What is your ultimate favourite crime novel of all time? |
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| For me, moral ambiguity is probably the most compelling theme in crime novels. ‘The Expats’ merely dabbles in that realm, but Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ is the masterpiece exploration of this central human dilemma. |
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