An interview provided by the author for FreshFiction.com – You’ve written novels set in many places around the world (and you’ve traveled to even more!). How do you capture the nuance of a place in your writing, in order to create such vivid settings? I resist writing stories about places I don’t know well in terms of both setting and culture, which is another way of saying: I need to have spent a lot of time in a place before I write about it. My current release, Fire on the Island, set in Greece, is the best example of that. My first job after college was in Greece, to which I’ve returned to numerous times, cumulatively spending some seven years in the country. For the last fifteen years, I’ve gone every spring to the same village on the island of Lesvos where Fire on the Island is set. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, I had a very exciting career in international development that took me around the world many times. In Poland and Jerusalem, I worked on long-term assignments (meaning over two years), so naturally those became settings for two of my novels. In only one case, Cooper’s Promise,…
