Mysteries and Thrillers have always been popular for their fast pacing, smart dialogue and unexpected plot twists. And as both a writer and a reader, I’d certainly agree those are essential ingredients to any page-turner. But what about relationships? I’d argue that characters drive plot, and your empathy for the characters, as a reader, is what drives suspense. It’s your relationship with the characters — and their relationships with each other — that makes a mystery work. And it’s the tension in those relationships that keeps you up at night turning the pages. Think about it. Does the action matter if you don’t care about the people involved? We’ve all been to movies where we’re sitting on the edge of our seat, mouth full of popcorn, knuckles white as cars tear through narrow city streets on the big screen. And yet we’ve also been to movies where a similar car chase nearly puts us to sleep, and even the final explosion as a car tumbles down the cliff only lingers as an after-image inside our drooping eyelids. The only different between those two movies was our empathy — or lack thereof — with the people in the cars. My latest…

When a U.S. Senator is found dead on a golf course in Mexico, it falls to his estranged daughter to find out what really happened. That’s how the story begins in my latest novel Greasing The Piñata, which Library Journal called “a cracking good mystery.” The plot moves between San Francisco landmarks to some beautiful regions of Mexico, but the characters soon discover that even the most tourist-friendly destinations can harbor criminals and reveal dangers never seen on any postcard. As a writer I’ve always been intrigued by what lies beneath the surface, just out of sight. My first novel Stealing The Dragon explored the back alleys of San Francisco’s Chinatown, a city within a city that transforms from a bustling tourist destination by day to a world of shadows and secrets by night. The local Tong gangs are never mentioned in any travel guides for the city, and the local gangsters never mentioned in the local papers, and yet they exist in an unseen underworld, unless you’re willing to take a walk down the right (or wrong) alley and have a look. My second novel Beating The Babushka is a satire of the move industry that reveals what really…