One of my writing communities recently had a discussion about how many suspects you need to have in a mystery novel. Most people settled on four or five, but a few authors pointed out that you could write a story with only one viable suspect, as long as you kept the audience in suspense the whole time about whether he is guilty or whether the detective would be able to catch him. This is the Columbo model of storytelling, and it can be highly entertaining, especially if you have Peter Falk to pull it off.

In real life, investigators may winnow the field to just a suspect or two and yet still be unable to prove their case. The most fascinating example of this that I have come across is the murder of Diane Kyne. Diane Kyne was home one afternoon with just her husband, Bill, and her adult son, Kevin, when she was strangled to death. One of the men is surely her killer…but which one?

Both men called 911 to report the murder at roughly the same time, and each claimed the other one had killed Diane. The police arrived to find Bill and Kevin grappling on the lawn, accusing each other of murder. Investigation of the scene showed Diane dead in her bedroom, a victim of strangulation. There was a pair of glasses and a shoe nearby, and a few drops of blood on the bed near her body.

The son, Kevin, had a wicked temper. He had made violent threats against family members in the past, and the police had been out to the house previously when the fighting with Kevin grew out of hand. Kevin had been kicked out of the house before, but Diane let him back in. Rumor had it she was considering removing him again, possibly for good. Forensic investigation revealed that the sandals found near Diane’s body had Kevin’s DNA on them, and the drops of blood near her body belonged to him.

The husband, Bill, did not go check on his wife after he had found her not breathing…possibly because he knew she was already dead. Diane was strangled to death, and it was Bill’s DNA, not Kevin’s, that was found on her neck. Bill seemed to have the stronger motive for murdering Diane: he stood to collect $750,000 in insurance money after her death. And Bill had experience in this department! He had already collected $250,000 in insurance money following the strange death of his first wife. Wife #1 had supposedly awoken in the night, wandered out into the pool area, somehow hit her head, and drowned. Her death was ruled an accident.

The police eventually arrested Kevin for Diane’s murder, and he was initially convicted and sentenced to life in prison. At a second trial, however, the jury ruled Kevin not guilty. Prosecutors are reluctant to retry the case a third time.

By all accounts, Bill and Kevin despised one another, so it’s improbable that they conspired to kill Diane. This leaves us with a situation where both men know the truth, and yet we from the outside cannot definitively spot the liar. Out of the 7 billion people on the planet Earth, Diane Kyne’s killer can be narrowed to a population of just two men…but that’s all it takes for the guilty party to walk free.

What do you think? Was it Bill or Kevin?

Today is my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Someone asked me if they would be renewing their vows for the occasion. I replied that no, they’re just having a party because they really have those vows down by now. Richer and poorer, sickness and health. There’s no need to go over the fine print again because this marriage is fully battle-tested.

They met in college playing bridge. My father, a brilliant bridge player, hates to lose at anything and he quickly deduced my mother was smart enough to keep up with him. Plus, he thought she was cute. They played hours of cards together and his course grades plummeted. Dad was hooked.

Their own parents each had stormy marriages, so my parents had to create a new roadmap for what a happy couple looked like. Mostly, it meant that they strove to be nice to one another. This sounds like a small thing, but it’s actually quite huge. Many times we are polite to strangers but save our worst behavior for our loved ones. Not my parents. My mother would ask my father how his day was and actually listen to the answer. My father would show up periodically with flowers for no particular reason, other than they were pretty and he thought they would make her smile.

Not that they didn’t have arguments. I remember in particular some fun times driving around Europe in the days before GPS. My father drove the car while my mother pored over the map, trying to figure out where we were. By the time she’d located the street name, he’d driven somewhere else. I learned all my best swear words touring Europe with my parents!

But they have always supported each other. Mom proofread his scientific papers (just ask her about middle T!) and Dad took up the viola in middle age so that he could join her orchestra. They order the same meal in restaurants and can finish each other’s stories. One memorable Christmas they even gave each other the same book…wrapped in the same paper.

Happy endings often get a bad rap in fiction. They are dismissed as unrealistic or trite. Serious literature is filled with perennially unhappy characters who do terrible things to one another, sometimes in the name of love, as if purpose cannot exist without suffering. These books aren’t wrong, of course. Pain comes for us all in some form or another. Especially in the span of fifty years, you will find examples of suffering, if that’s what you’re looking for. You’ll also find light and laughter and the beauty of choosing the same person over and over again. It’s all in how you frame the story.

A few years ago, my mother told me she’d briefly broken up with my dad when they were dating. I asked him for his perspective on this apparent blip in their otherwise happy life together. “Dad, I had no idea that Mom broke up with you way back when!”

Dad, lowered his newspaper, a furrow in his brow. “She did?”

“You know, when she moved to New York and was seeing other people.”

“But I visited her in New York!”

“Yeah, so did other people, apparently. You’re telling me that Mom broke up with you and you never even noticed?”

“Huh. Guess so.” He raised his paper again, and I stared at him some more, amazed that he could continue calmly reading in the face of this shattering news. Mom had had serious doubts at one point! She’d dumped my dad for some other guy(s).

“Dad, this doesn’t bother you even a little bit?” I waved my arms around.

He peeked over the paper. “Why should it? I won.”

Summer’s here! I love the hazy days of summer, when the sun lingers in the sky and school’s out and the pace of life seems just a bit slower. Summer in Boston means sailboats on the river, neighborhood ice cream trucks, and concerts on the common. There are days hot enough to sizzle the concrete and thunderstorms that rock the sky.

I like to set my stories in locations I know fairly well, either because I have lived there or visited often. Boston and its environs are most familiar to me, and I’ve placed The Vanishing Season in Massachusetts during the summertime. The oppressive heat adds to the sense of dread that Ellery has when she realizes the time has come for another person to go missing.

I’ve also resided in Southern California and traveled extensively in the USA and beyond, so other cities and towns show up in my stories. Each location has its own rhythms and flavors, and it’s fun to try to capture that sense of place on the page. Southern California, for example, gets rain so infrequently that the first time it happens during their “rainy season” the drivers all act like they have never seen water fall from the sky before. They either drive like they’ve got a newborn baby on board or they put the pedal to the metal figuring they’ll just outrun the rain and get home as quickly as possible.

Boston and its fellow East Coast cities are more humid. On hot days your clothes might melt against your body when you step outside. The windows on the subway cars become fogged with condensation—and oh yeah, you can smell your fellow passengers. But you also get blazing orange sunsets and sandy beaches and the bracing cold of the Atlantic Ocean. You get city sprinklers filled with dashing, laughing children, and the especially sweet taste of an icy popsicle on a hot day. There’s the smell of fresh cut grass and ocean breezes and backyard BBQs.

I especially love writing about summer when Boston’s showing off its other side—the several gray months of the year when its frozen under a blanket of snow and you find yourself ankle deep in slush when you step off the city curb. Writing about the cheery, sun-filled days helps me hang on until they come ‘round again, so I’m happy to use as many descriptive words as possible to bring them to life.

It’s a request so common that many authors have a FAQ devoted to it: “I have an idea for a book. What if I told you my idea and then you wrote it?” My book isn’t even out yet, and I’ve already been approached by a couple of people with this proposal, offering to split the profits 50/50.

First of all: 50-50? Putting the words on the page is at least 80% of the work!

Second of all: Just no. Coming up with the ideas is the fun part for most of us, including me, and we’re not looking to outsource that particular aspect of the job.

Still, the craft of writing and the business of publishing have a lot of learning around them, and no one is born knowing it all. Every successful writer has been a clueless newbie at some point, needing to rely on others to show them the way. In fact, I am still very new to all this and seek out the advice of more experienced writers all the time. I am grateful beyond belief when they spare a minute from their busy lives to help me.

If you’re a successful person in any industry or hobby, though, it’s not possible to help everyone. Steven Pressfield wrote a piece this week on how he draws the line at what he calls “clueless asks.” These would be questions from rude people, or those asking for information that is easily findable by looking for it yourself.

My husband, who is a software engineer, has a T-shirt that reads, “No, I won’t fix your computer.” The spoiler is that he totally will fix your computer as long as you are not a jerk about it. I think the same is probably true for writers. We do like to help each other out, even beginners, because we’ve all needed that help at some point in our careers.

I’m still not going to write your whole book for you, though. That kind of fun I am selfishly keeping for myself!

Dialogue is crucially important for any story. In a written tale, it’s possible to go inside someone’s head to learn what he or she is thinking, but in real life, our thoughts are mostly communicated by the words we speak to one another. Dialogue can advance a plot or reveal information—sometimes clumsily, as when the forensic technicians on CSI would explain the tools to one another for the benefit of their audience. Dialogue can also illuminate character through word choice and style. If you pick your phrases right, your reader will get a vivid picture of the speaker from just a few key sentences.

Take, for example, my mother. I could tell you lots of factoids about my mother. Instead, I’ll relay the following story and let you form your own conclusions:

The summer of my seventeenth year, I drove a car into my house. I had completed the Driver’s Ed classroom course with a hundred percent score. With my freshly printed permit in hand, I was eager to try my luck behind an actual wheel. My mother said I could have the keys and we set out with my little brother in tow to visit the local library.

We lived on the corner of a fairly quiet side street and a much busier main road. I backed the car out of the driveway okay and maneuvered it to the corner. I had never even turned a car on before, so the idea that I should take it onto the open road seemed ludicrous to me. My mother, however, was game on. “Turn the wheel and give it some gas,” she instructed.

For the record, I said, “Shouldn’t I be in a parking lot?”

My mother said, “Just make a right turn. It’s easy enough.”

She did not say how far to turn the wheel or how much gas to give it, so I turned the wheel very far and gave it a heck of a lot of gas. We made a hairpin turn at high speed, wrecking the rear axel of the car as we jumped the high curb.

Now we were hurtling across my front lawn, heading for the cement steps. “Brake! Brake!” my mother hollered.

“I’m trying!” I hollered back, sure that we were going to die. Problem was, I had no idea which pedal was which. I gave it even more gas.

My mother jerked the wheel at the last minute, and instead of hitting the cement steps head-on, we demolished a group of bushes and careened into the front porch. I knocked a support beam out from under the front of the house, and it collapsed on top of the car, which is what finally stopped it.

We all got out, miraculously unharmed. A Ford Taurus lay dead in front of us, sticking out from under the house like the Wicked Witch of the East when Dorothy lands on her after the tornado. Hand to God, the first thing my mother said was, “I never liked those bushes anyway.”

So there you go. Now you know my mother. This is a line only she would say, and so it encapsulates her in a way that a long list of adjectives never could. It’s the same economy of description that I aim for when I’m inventing fictional people.

Amazingly, the car lived to ride again, but there is a sad epilogue to this story. Are you ready?

Those bushes grew back.

I’m a bad writer in that I still don’t have a succinct elevator pitch for The Vanishing Season. On its face, it’s about a female police officer in Massachusetts trying to solve a set of disappearances from her small town. More broadly, though, it’s about issues surrounding identity. What makes us who we are?

Ellery Hathaway was kidnapped late at night on her fourteenth birthday by a famous serial killer. He became famous the only way serial killers can achieve real fame—by being caught—so Ellery theoretically gets to resume her normal life. However, public appetite for the sensational story lingers on more than a decade after her rescue. The killer is in jail but he still manages to follow Ellery around—on film, in books, in pop culture references ala John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy. Ellery’s abductor didn’t succeed in snuffing her out but he did take her life, the one she would have had if he’d never kidnapped her. So Ellery’s journey is largely about whether she can reclaim her own narrative from under the weight of this infamous case.

Meanwhile, Ellery’s savior, Agent Reed Markham, is facing his own identity crisis. He’d played a hunch as a junior FBI agent and saved Ellery from certain death. In doing so, he’d also solved one of the FBI’s most infamous cases and his career rocketed to stardom as a result. He wrote a bestselling book about the case and Ellery’s rescue, telling himself through the years that he is the hero of this story. (Here we already see some conflict in their viewpoints, as Reed has helped further the fame of the case and feed public fervor, which hurts the very woman he waxes on about rescuing.) But Reed’s blown a recent investigation and his marriage is falling apart—maybe he’s not the rock star he’s always imagined himself to be. He’s on stress leave from the FBI when his greatest triumph emerges from the past, asking him for help in her missing persons cases.

What’s interesting to me about putting Reed and Ellery together is that they are bonded by the events of the night he rescued her, but they experienced that time in starkly different ways. The best time in his life is the worst time of hers. They’ve each told themselves stories about how the rescue went down and built up myths about the other one in their own minds. This book is about what happens when those myths meet reality. If Ellery remains damaged by what happened to her in the killer’s closet, does that lessen Reed’s heroics? Who is he without that label? Who is she apart from a famous victim? If public perception locks them into these roles, does it even matter what the truth is?

So, yeah. That’s what it’s about. Murder. Identity. Betrayal. The past coming back to bite you in the butt. All that, plus an extremely friendly basset hound.