Today, I’m sitting down with the heroine of The Profiler series, Evelyn Baine, to find out more about how she balances her job with the FBI and the rest of her life: So, Evelyn, what exactly do you do for the FBI? “I’m a criminal investigative analyst – what you might call a profiler – for the Behavioral Analysis Unit. If you’ve got a crime where everything you’ve tried has failed to find you the perpetrator, you call my unit. We don’t need forensics or obvious suspects. What we do is look at the crime scene and read the psychology behind it. What caused the perpetrator to do this? What kind of person is he? How do you find him?” That sounds really complicated. How did you get into this line of work? “Sometimes it is complicated. I don’t really like to talk about my personal life, but I learned about profilers when I was twelve years old. My best friend disappeared and an FBI profiler came to town to find her. He never did, so it became my life’s mission to join the FBI, learn how to profile cases myself and one day figure out what happened to her.”…

At every new book launch, certain questions pop up again and again: “Where do you get your ideas?” “What’s the process of writing a book?” It’s different for every writer, and while my process has evolved some over the years, fundamentally it’s stayed the same through ten published novels: The Big Idea: For me, every book begins with a big idea, something that gets me excited. Usually, it comes in the form of “What if…” In STALKED, my latest psychological suspense, it was “What if a teenager disappeared, leaving behind a note that said if anyone was reading it, she was already dead?” That first idea bloomed into more questions: “Was she really dead? Why would she leave a note like that instead of trying to get help before she disappeared? Was it really the teenager who left the note, or someone else?” The big idea stage can take a while: I may discard a lot of ideas before I find one that both excites me enough as a hook (something compelling enough to intrigue a reader to want more) and has enough depth and possibility to it to sustain an entire novel (100,000 words!). Once I’ve settled on that…

Everton, PA is the fictional setting for my latest release, NIGHT OF THE FLOOD – a collaborative “novel in stories” featuring contributions from Rob Brunet, Gwen Florio, J.J. Hensley, Jennifer Hillier, Shannon Kirk, Sarah M. Chen, Wendy Tyson, E.A. Aymar, Jenny Milchman, Angel Colon, Mark Edwards, Alan Orloff, Hilary Davidson, and an introduction from Hank Phillippi Ryan. Here are a few reasons you might want to steer clear of Everton: The dam broke – and it wasn’t an accident: After Maggie Wilbourne became the first woman in modern times to be executed in Pennsylvania (for killing her rapists), a group of activists protested her execution by blowing up the dam. “The Daughters,” as they’re known, wanted to send a message – and they did, because now the whole town is going underwater. Things are scarier in the dark: As the water slowly submerges the town over a period of twenty-four hours (during which all the stories are set), the electricity is going out, too. The residents of the town have two choices: hunker down and try to wait it out, or make a break for it, in canoes or kayaks or even a big-rig truck. But without electricity, it’s harder…

Writers all get their start as avid readers, and most of us never stop devouring books. One of the coolest benefits of being an author is getting the inside scoop about upcoming books. So, I want to share with you some of the books that have just released within the past month – or are coming soon – that I’ve already read and loved, or can’t wait to get my hands on! Here are those books – and a secret look behind the scenes from each author! (Make sure you read to the bottom to see how you can win signed copies of two of these fabulous books now!) BREAKING POINT by Allison Brennan What it’s about: Lucy Kincaid is on the hot-seat with her new boss, but that won’t stop her from helping her friend JT Caruso find his sister, who goes missing while working undercover in a human trafficking organization. Go behind the scenes: Breaking Point is a Lucy Kincaid book, but former cop Bella Caruso kicks off the book and I immediately fell in love with her. Bella is both smart and dangerous, and is willing to take any risk to protect the most innocent in society….

Criminal profiling is a fascinating process, a mix of psychology and criminology that tends to create divided reactions: people seem to think it’s either magic or complete BS. The reality is that it’s neither. Profiling takes a crime and predicts the type of person most likely to have committed it – profiles can be as vague as a “white male in his twenties” (which has become a bit of a joke about profiling serial killers) or as specific as “a man in his forties who works a blue-collar job during the second shift, is divorced, has at least one child, and drives a dark-colored sedan.” Narrowing down type of person helps law enforcement center their search and the FBI has an entire unit devoted to the job. Now called the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), it’s been memorialized in both fiction and non-fiction: CRIMINAL MINDS: Although some of the details of the show are just literary license for the sake of fast-moving plot (the BAU’s own private jet, all the profilers flying to consult on each big case, the active “door-kicking” roles the agents take in most of the cases), the profiles themselves are pretty solid. And they should be –…

In real life, when there’s a horrible, seemingly inexplicable crime, people crowd around the TV to watch interviews with the people who knew the perpetrator best, wanting to know: How could this seemingly normal person do something so shocking? And even more, why did he do it? Did those around him know something was off or was everyone surprised? In real life, we like to speculate about motive and it’s often a key component in criminal trials when it comes to putting the person behind bars. Often, it’s hard to believe someone is guilty until we’re told why he would do it. In fiction, the same thing is true. I’d venture to say that if you’ve ever thrown a mystery against the wall because you don’t buy who the bad guy turns out to be, it probably has to do with motive. You don’t buy into the big reveal because this person didn’t seem to have a strong enough reason to commit the crime. Traditionally, “police procedurals” have really focused on the who and the how, but the why is just as important – and I think, often the most interesting piece. That’s one of the reasons I love writing…