In Michael Sears’s Love the Stranger (Soho Crime, Dec.), Ted Molloy tries to clear his girlfriend’s name after she lands in the crosshairs of a shady real estate developer.
Before you were a writer, you worked on Wall Street; before that, you were an actor. How have those experiences shaped your writing?
As an actor, you have to delve into character, which you also have to do as a novelist. I sit here in my room and have conversations between characters, switching perspectives, and the discipline I have from my years as an actor really helps. My background in finance, on the other hand—especially the experiences I’ve had working in real estate—has given me insight into how much business begets opportunity for fraud and misdealing, which is obviously a big part of my writing.
This book spends a lot of time with Ted and Kenzie, his organizer girlfriend, who’s quite different from him. What did you enjoy about building their dynamic? What was challenging?
Kenzie is tough for me to write because she’s so self-assured, and Ted is not. Ted has gotten pushed around, and he’s often willing to take the path of least resistance, whereas Kenzie wants to take the high road, which does create some tensions between them at times.
I love playing with that.
What makes writing PI stories unique compared to your financial thrillers?
I love that Ted’s not an expert in a lot of the areas he has to investigate, so his learning gets to mirror my own. I’m not an investigator, a policeman, or a lawyer, but I genuinely enjoy learning about the processes and complications involved with those jobs. I consult friends in those fields to ensure accuracy, and it’s amazing how willing people are to share their expertise and how much they love talking about what they do.
What themes unite your work?
Guilt and the blurry lines between who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy. Ted is a conflicted hero, far from the classic upright detective—he keeps having to puzzle out these questions of right and wrong. I love it when characters have to closely examine their senses of self; it’s an arc I hope I can keep going for quite a while.
What makes Queens such fertile ground for exploring those themes?
Queens isn’t immediately thought of as the “sexy” borough, yet upward mobility happens in it, which doesn’t happen in Manhattan anymore and rarely happens in Brooklyn these days. People can live their whole lives there in a community, surrounded by people they know well, as though it’s a small town. That’s what drew me to it.
