HOW ARE CRIME AUTHORS GOING TO ADDRESS THE PANDEMIC IN THEIR NEW BOOKS?

Only when an entire decade had passed had I gained distance and perspective to revisit that idea. Nightwatcher (HarperCollins), about an unhinged killer preying on vulnerable New Yorkers in the days after the 9/11 attacks, was published eleven years after I’d conceived it, in September, 2012.

Flash forward to March, 2020. I was between books, having just finished revising my upcoming release The Butcher’s Daughter (William Morrow, September 2020) and about to begin writing a new one, when the world was again irrevocably altered. My husband returned to his midtown office after lunch to find the building cordoned off, surrounded by law enforcement, the press, and medical teams in hazmat suits. It turned out that the first confirmed local case of Covid-19—the New Rochelle man whose illness would result in a cluster and the nation’s first lockdown right here in Westchester—worked in the building.

In short order, things escalated—Governor Cuomo closed the universities, the NBA curtailed its season, and businesses skidded to a halt. No more commuting to Manhattan for my husband and our older son; no more college for our younger son, two months shy of graduation and plucked from his Ithaca apartment to be locked down with us in his childhood bedroom.

With four of us suddenly stuck under one roof 24/7, perpetually short on supplies, with illness and death surging all around us, I put my new proposal aside for a while. My time was encompassed with domestic tasks that had become pervasive and logistics-challenged. When I wasn’t scavenging local shelves for paper towels and yeast, I was hiking in the woods to preserve my sanity and some semblance of fitness, and chasing grim nightly news reports with lullaby-esque Friends reruns. Throughout, my Writer Brain was in overdrive and the What Ifs kept coming—several ideas for crime novels that would take place, could only take place, amid this grim new world of quarantining and social distancing. But once again, it was all too raw, too fresh, as yet unfolding.