I decided once again that Thorn needed a break from me. For one thing, he needed a chance to recuperate and get the strength in his legs back. He also needed a chance to make some new friends. Aside from his lifelong buddy, Sugarman, an Afro-American private eye, Thorn was running low on friends. Most of them had been killed in previous novels.

I took for my inspiration in Body Language an event from the Miami headlines. At the time the reporters dubbed the event, the Dash for Cash. A Brinks armored truck broke open in Liberty City (a particularly poor part of the city) and a host of citizens grabbed up as much of the loot as they could manage. I decided to use the incident as the basis for a caper. I’ve had a long love affair with caper stories, those wonderful heists and break-ins or hijackings that are run like a military operation. I decided I wanted my caper to be unique. The thief decides to use the crashing of his truck to obscure the heist he’s pulling off.

As I began to write, however, the novel took a different turn. The man who pulled off the caper just wasn’t as interesting to me as his wife. Alexandra Rafferty is a crime scene photographer for the Miami Police Department and in the course of that job, she is forced to shoot photos of several young women who have been raped and murdered. As the novel progresses, she begins to realize that these murders are somehow related to her own past, an event that took place when she was only a girl.

I also introduced Lawton Collins, Alexandra’s father. He’s suffering from a deteriorating memory which makes him at times irritating as well as funny and wise and pathetic. I never knew what this old guy was going to do next, which made writing about him great fun.

The more I got to know Alexandra, the more I thought she might make a good love interest for Thorn.