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January 2008
Dear Readers, I suppose, as a child, I was scared of the things most kids are afraid of, like noises in the middle of the night or something bad happening to my parents. My father was an FBI agent and I remember there always being, in my mind, a slight air of danger about him as he worked to uncover Russian espionage during the Cold War and, later, on kidnapping and extortion cases. He kept a gun in the top drawer of his dresser. My sister and I were forbidden to go anywhere near it... but, of course, once in a while, I would sneak a peek, even touch it. I remember shivering at the prospect of what it could do, but, conversely, waking up in the middle of the night and feeling safer because my father had the gun in the room across the hall and would protect us of if someone bad came into the house on O'Toole Street. I'm not afraid of the dark anymore but I still worry about guns and loosing my parents. Yet I think it's fair to say there was some sense of intrigue and suspense as I grew up. Who knows if that somehow influenced me to eventually get into suspense writing? I guess it certainly didn't hurt. One of the most common questions I'm asked is "Where do you get your ideas?" As the saying goes, I write what I know. The ideas came from what happens to me and I see around me. I've worked at CBS News since I graduated from college and, over the years, I've been privileged to have a job that has exposed me to some pretty amazing things, things that have shown me that truth can be stranger than fiction. Television news provides many colorful characters with interesting idiosyncrasies. Among the dedicated, intelligent and well meaning, there are also the calculating and ambitious with egos run amok... perfect personalities for book characters! In this series of media thrillers I've had great fun creating a fictional television news world and staffing it with characters and watching what they do in the glamorous, always competitive, high-stakes world of television news. By having the reporters and producers and camera people of KEY News leave the studio and go out into the world to cover their stories, I'm given the opportunity to have the characters go just about anywhere, get involved in just about anything and find themselves smack in the middle of mystery and suspense. Pay attention, dear reader, because every word is a clue. Mary Jane |
