When I was 30 or so – by that time I had become an assistant D.A. – I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become...

I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to listen. You know, being confident isn’t the same as being right.

I can’t say that I ever actually decided to become a writer. It kind of snuck up on me.

This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment....

I don’t ever write with a particular audience in mind. I just write books that please me.

I am interested in computers and technology, and art, photography, and design.

I love sports, as all Bostonians seem to. I love books and movies, as all writers seem to.

Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes.

I’m a bit of a tech geek myself.

You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.

Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie.

But sometimes you can’t figure everything out because you can’t ever really understand other people. You can’t understand why they do what they do. You just have to accept a little mystery, Ben. People are...

Probably careful plotting reflects my personality. I am meticulous by nature. I can’t imagine speed-writing anything that happens to pop into my head.

So I got on with the business of lawyering away at the evidence. Minimizing it. Defending Jacob.

Well, I outline fanatically. I am a long thinker and a slow writer, though I am trying to get faster.

It was a limitation of human consciousness: We live only in the future and past, we cannot perceive now. Now occupies no space, a hypothetical gap between future and past. Only an exceptional few could...

Genes are not simple triggers. No one is hardwired to commit murder or any other crime. Our actions are always the result of stupendously complex gene-environment interactions, and environment is likely to remain the more...

With the minivan in the air, rolling counterclockwise, the engine racing, Laurie screaming — a fraction of a second, that’s all — Jacob would have thought of me — who had held him, my own...