Remember "Jenny 867-5309" from way back? Well, I was a kid when the song came out, and at that point in my life everyone called me Jenny. All I remember was everyone wondering who Jenny was, calling the number to ask for Jenny, and hearing stories that the people with that phone number had to have their phone disconnected because it wouldn't stop ringing (although that's probably an urban myth from the time, much like the rumor that Mikey from the LIFE cereal commercials died while drinking Coke and eating Pop Rocks). In any case, the idea always stuck with me, and every time I hear a song I wonder what inspired the writer and whether the content of the lyrics are real or mere creative license.

I was always interested in writing and even took a shot as an undergrad at a student newspaper job while attending Florida State but aside from one article on street construction in Tallahassee I was unsuccessful.

I moved on to police work and have been quite happy with my choice since the first day in the academy. I like the physical nature of the job. I love the diversity I experience every day, never knowing exactly what my assignment might be. It may sound hokey, but I like helping people and see the relief on their faces when we show up at a disaster or particularly nasty crime scene.

It's probably true that you write the books you'd like to read. One day I started, just for fun, writing a book I had always wanted to read; a mystery novel as hard-boiled as I could make it, but with two significant restrictions: I wanted a woman in the lead role, and I wanted to make all the characters as real as I could, rather then rely on the conventions of noir, or the conventions of society at large (for example, the conventional wisdom that drug addicts are evil and heartless, that family is always kind and helpful, and so on). I loved old mystery novels and noir films (and still do), but as dark as some of them are, I felt like few were honest enough. Most seemed to stop short of some truth about the detective and his client, and I wanted to go beyond that point, to get at a deeper, more resonant place in the mystery. A further restriction I set for myself as I went along was that, aside from all my high-flying literary ideas, the book had to be an engaging mystery as well. I'd read plenty of "literary" mysteries that were neither.

I grew up in Jersey City during the 1970s, a somewhat bizarre, often hyper-insightful world where, amidst the urban blight and screwed-up politics, people were judged not by what they did for a living, or what they did to the rest of the world, or even for their larger "reputations," but rather by how they treated you directly. And so it was not uncommon to hear bluntly, within the same sentence, of a "kind" and "gentle" hit man or a "rotten, selfish" priest.

As a reader, the first garden that meant anything to me was The Secret Garden written by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was more than magical, it was deeply mysterious: locked up and hidden behind a stone wall with overgrown trees that reached for the sky.

It was the first mystery I'd ever heard read to me and opened up a floodgate of questions. Why was the garden locked? Why wasn't the lord of the manor ever home? What was the very secret hinted at in the title?

And so began my love of mysteries, forever intertwining suspense and gardens for me.