Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes.

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

I love sports, as all Bostonians seem to. I love books and movies, as all writers seem to.

When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.

With the Internet, fans feel like they know you and I love that kind of connection.

People who are digital native, they want to have real-time performance feedback. They want to understand where they are, what might happen, what their future is. And they want to understand that quickly in a very direct conversation.

It's very rare that things are true about yourself that are on the Internet. It's just sad sometimes. So you definitely try and stay away from it as much as possible.

I'm a geek through and through. My last job at Microsoft was leading much of the search engine relevance work on Bing. There we got to play with huge amounts of data, with neural networks and other AI techniques, with massive server farms.