Years ago, when my attempts at a writing career came to a complete stand-still, I applied to the Los Angeles Police Department. This might seem odd for a liberal woman who once went to UC Santa Cruz, but I've always had a powerful fascination with crime and serious interest in finding different ways to contend with it.

Lisa Lutz

Hair color is the easiest way to change your appearance, but a bad dye job might draw more attention to you.

Lisa Lutz

I have a love/hate relationship with jogging.

Lisa Lutz

Sometimes a single item can wrap up, in a nutshell, who a person is. In my grandparents' home, a clear plastic container was enthroned on top of the mahogany bar for at least a decade. Painted on the lid in pink, yellow and light blue was 'Have a Nosh With Mort & Ethel'.

Lisa Lutz

We're all amateur investigators. We scan bookshelves, we ogle trinkets left out in the open, we calculate the cost of furniture and study the photographs on display; sometimes we even check out the medicine cabinet.

Lisa Lutz

I wrote the first draft of 'Plan B' the summer after I turned 21.

Lisa Lutz

Years ago, when my attempts at a writing career came to a complete stand-still, I applied to the Los Angeles Police Department. This might seem odd for a liberal woman who once went to UC Santa Cruz, but I've always had a powerful fascination with crime and serious interest in finding different ways to contend with it.

Lisa Lutz

My mother, at sixty, is one of those classic beauties: all neck and cheekbones, sharp lines that hide her wrinkles from a distance. She still gets whistles from construction workers from three stories up.

Lisa Lutz

I'm always accused of being a crime novelist, but I'm not really.

Lisa Lutz

My writing process is chaos. I usually start with an overarching theme. Then I establish several story threads, but I don't outline. I just start writing and keep notes for what may come. It's an organic process that's usually pretty flexible.

Lisa Lutz

I was on a few surveillance jobs as part of a big team. I would be the person to follow the subject on foot when the need arose. But most of the time, we were sitting in a car doing nothing.

Lisa Lutz

I loved writing the Spellman novels, but I never had any plan to only write in one genre.

Lisa Lutz

'Await Your Reply' by Dan Chaon. I've always been obsessed with the idea of disappearing and becoming someone else. Even if you don't share that obsession, I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Lisa Lutz

I was young, maybe 4, when I learned where babies came from.

Lisa Lutz

I have certain rules for snooping, under which anything out in the open is fair game.

Lisa Lutz

I don't feel like I'm a writer who works under any influence.

Lisa Lutz

I am a huge Mel Brooks fan. And I do think that not seeing his canon of classics is a bit criminal or clueless.

Lisa Lutz

I was never obsessed with being adopted. I was simply curious about my biological parents.

Lisa Lutz

Finally, I'm recognizing that rewrites aren't some cosmic punishment for childhood wrongs but the nature of the business.

Lisa Lutz

For more than three months, I had been president and primary owner of Spellman Investigations, and I can say with complete certainty that I had more power in this office as an underling. My title, it seemed, was purely decorative. I was captain of an unfashionable and sinking ship.

Lisa Lutz

I learned how to cross-country ski.

Lisa Lutz