As is often the case, I rubbed two very different subject matters together to come up with the idea for Dead Last. At a library event I bumped into Matt Schudel, a journalist friend who formerly wrote feature stories for the Florida Sun-Sentinel. He told me he’d moved to the Washington Post and was writing obituaries. I asked him how it felt to be an obituary writer. (I was under the impression that he’d suffered a demotion.) He told me that it was the most challenging and invigorating writing he’d ever done. So I immediately began to read his obituaries and was impressed. To capture the richness and emotional heft of a person’s life in a few hundred words is an amazing feat when it’s done well. This began a several month period of research in obituary writing in general.

The other subject I was interested in at the time was TV production. One of my former students and now friend, Terry Miller, was having a very successful career in Hollywood. He was assistant first director on major films like Ace Ventura, Die Hard, and Lethal Weapon. At the time I was planning the new novel, Terry was producer of the TV series, Burn Notice, being shot in Miami. Terry invited me to the set and some of the material I gathered during those visits helped shaped the storyline of Dead Last.

Forging a connection between obituary writing and TV production may seem weird and incongruous, but that’s just the kind of challenge that stirs my creative juices.

I’d never written a straight out serial killer novel before, and I had my doubts that I could bring anything new to the genre. But when Thorn discovers that he has not one but two sons he didn’t know he had, I realized I was writing something more than a simple whodunit.