When I began No Place Safe: A Family Memoir, I didn't expect it to be a memoir at all. It was going to be me telling my mother's story of being a cop on a 1980s serial murder investigation. New to nonfiction, I wasn't sure if it should be a biography or a true crime story. Interviewing my mother helped me figure out exactly what story I was going to be telling. I also spent time looking through a box of files, notes and pictures she kept about the case, expecting someone eventually would write about it. She had hoped it would be me, but I resisted for years because I was a novelist, though I hadn't yet sold a novel.

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