My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.

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

What I'm doing is writing stories about women who care about justice. They are women who think about the difference between right and wrong what's legal and illegal ethical and unethical moral and immoral.

Truly I never thought of myself as writing legal thrillers and I still don't think I do. I write stories about women.

Growing up my sisters and I would always talk stories. One of my frustrations was I didn't know anything about cameras. I didn't know how to make a film and I obviously didn't have a special effects budget. I was a kid. So I was learning to draw to get down the stuff that was in my head that I couldn't afford to actually do.

I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.

I discovered that in a story I could safely dream any dream hope any hope go anywhere I pleased any time I pleased fight any foe win or lose live or die. My stories created a safe experimental learning place.

I'm most interested in working and learning from different people and telling good stories.

A love of books of holding a book turning its pages looking at its pictures and living its fascinating stories goes hand-in-hand with a love of learning.

For four years I listened to stories of intelligence failures and it wasn't due to incompetence of anyone in the system but that the system is so arcane.