Jodi Picoult is a study in contrasts. She lives in an idyllic farmhouse in Hanover, N.H., with her husband, Tim, a stay-at-home dad to their three children. There are cows in the yard and a friendly Springer spaniel named Gus running about. When PW visits Picoult to talk about the latest of her 12 novels, Vanishing Acts, out next month from Atria, New England is in the grip of winter, which only makes the warmth and settledness of the Picoult home all the more welcome. Indeed, the house hums with wholesome domesticity, and the fresh-baked quiche and coffeecake on the counter tell Old Man Winter he's not so tough. The lovely house, with its view of snow-covered mountains, hardly seems the setting for the production of works that plumb the dark depths of human nature.

"I do like to deal with hard topics like child abuse," says Picoult, 38, who has degrees from Princeton and Harvard. "I've found that when you throw it into fiction, you almost hook the reader by accident because you get people involved with the story of a family, the story of a person. You sort of go in the back door and crack open their thinking."

In Vanishing Acts, Picoult deals with child abduction and the sexual abuse of children; in My Sister's Keeper, a child suffers from a fatal illness; euthanasia is at the center of Mercy; teen suicide impels The Pact. Nonetheless, Picoult comes across as bright and warm. In conversation, she makes easy small talk about her three kids, ice hockey, the latest theories of learning (Picoult has a Master's in education ). She is aware that her children are living lives that hark back to an earlier, more innocent era. It is left to the characters in her books to deal with the perils of growing up today.

Indeed, Picoult, whose novels grapple heroically with many of the burning social issues of the day, most especially concerning the welfare of children, has been much praised for her ability to render a complexity of characterization. "My approach is like taking a can of worms and spilling it out and then asking everyone to put it back in," she comments. "Everyone is going to do it a different way and that's okay, because it's a 'what if' question.

"In Vanishing Acts, the question is, 'What if doing the right thing means doing the wrong thing? What if being a good parent means doing something that other parents would judge you very harshly for?' " The novel tells the story of Delia Hopkins, who, as a 32-year-old on the eve of her wedding, has a fleeting childhood memory involving her father and his role in a magic act she performed as a six-year-old. Her attempts to chase down this memory and pin it to truth become the novel's narrative drive, as Delia's widowed father moves in and out of shade.

"Just when you make up your mind that he's good, he starts running a crystal meth operation," Picoult says of the shape-changing father, laughing. "I went to a jail in Arizona," she adds. "Every detail about jail in that book is real. One of the detention officers set up interviews with inmates for me. The recipe for crystal meth came from an inmate named Corvette Steve. The good news is that I left out some very important steps. Don't try this at home. It will blow up in your face."

Picoult relishes research. On her refrigerator, there is a picture of her and her family dressed as Amish folk, a memento from her research for Plain Truth. For her next novel, The Tenth Circle, she spent time in an Eskimo village in Alaska.

While research adds authentic texture and detail to her tales, Picoult's work is about less time-bound themes—love under pressure, for example, or how moral challenges can draw us out in unsuspected ways. Picoult is proud of the moral depths of her work, and asks, dryly, "Isn't it interesting that this is considered to be commercial fiction?"

Picoult certainly is commercial. Her books consistently sell well; her Web site is imbued with the magnanimity of the beloved ("Jodi occasionally lurks here to see what people *really* have to say! Are you a writer? Share tips and questions on Jodi's new message board.... She'll be dropping in with hints from time to time!")

Like other ambitious writers of commercial fiction, Picoult chafes under the label while welcoming it, like a wool muffler on a cold day. "If you asked me, 'Are you commercial or are you literary?,' I would answer, 'I'm a commercial fiction writer.' In America you are very specifically targeted toward becoming either a commercial fiction writer or a literary fiction writer. But there is actually a wide range of commercial fiction. There is a lot of what I call 'McFiction,' and there are a handful of people who I consider to be commercial writers who write a beautiful book and an artistic book. Alice Hoffman, Anne Patchett, Anne Tyler, these are women who are good enough at their craft to be considered literary but they produce and sell like commercial writers.

"What you lose by deciding to become a commercial writer is a bit of pride," she concedes. "You can't count on a review in the New York Times. You probably never will be noticed by the National Book Awards." Never mind that a writer no less celebrated than Stephen King, when he received his recognition from the NBA in 2003, cited Picoult among a small group of authors usually thought of as commercial but equally deserving of recognition.

Storybook Start

"I had a ridiculously happy childhood," says Picoult. "I grew up in Nesconset, Long Island, in what was called the storybook development. Most of the streets had names like Prince Charming Lane, although we lived on Lloyd, which was not nearly as exciting. Every house looked the same. In fact, my thesis at Princeton was a novel called Developments. The protagonist is a real estate developer on Long Island who creates these developments. I'm very happy to say that this was not published, although it did teach me how to write a novel.

"My mom was a nursery school teacher and director, and my dad worked as a securities analyst on Wall Street. They were happily married and they are still happily married. I had one little brother and I liked him. My mom especially always encouraged my creativity. I never had any trauma.

"I know, I know—I have this really great existence and I write about this godawful stuff. I think that being able to leave my office and come downstairs to a happy family allows me to open that door to the dark side every day."

As with most writers, Picoult had an early mentor.

"I had an amazing teacher at Princeton, Mary Morris. She basically ripped me to shreds and showed me I wasn't as good as I thought I was. But she also believed in me in a way that made me fight back and realize I could be better. She taught me what a novel is supposed to be. I think the most important thing that she taught me is that a good novel functions as if every chapter is a short story. She taught me that a novel is really just a bunch of connected short stories.

"She also taught me that you can't write about the dinosaurs until they become oil."

For her next book, Picoult is on to something a little different. She runs upstairs to get the graphic art that will illustrate The Tenth Circle, a popular reimagining of Dante's Inferno.

"This is the story of a man who literally has to go through hell to find his 15-year-old daughter. In between every chapter, there are pages from a comic book. You can read this as a comic book by itself or as a novel by itself, but when you put it together it's greater than the sum of the parts.

"Lucifer was tossed out of Heaven over the issue of free will, and that's basically what this is about," Picoult adds. "The idea is that the lowest circle of Hell, even lower than betraying your benefactor, is betraying yourself."

Picoult is more than warming to the task of describing a trip through hell. "At the end, the devil makes a man decide who he is, and he winds up picking the most demonic, the worst version of himself because he realizes he can get everything he wants by admitting that."

Picoult smiles at us, aglow. The darkness of her theme has fled, a kind of vanishing act in itself, perpetrated by a writer's creative heat.