Over the past decade, my reputation as a writer has become inextricably linked to my hometown of Baltimore. Thirteen years, fourteen novels, and only one, In Big Trouble, is set outside Maryland. So why does the fifteenth, I'D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE, unfold in the suburbs of Washington D.C.? Read more [...]

I am making very few public appearances for this book -- Bethany Beach, Oxford, MD, Oxford, MS and Baltimore are pretty much it. Hence, the BOOB tour, with Memphis tacked on the very end. Although it looks like I'll make Los Angeles as well at the end of the month, and I still neeed to figure out a date in my second home, New Orleans, so -- BOOB-M-NOLA? Bubbelah? Read more [...]

By my calculations, the seventeen months between the hardcover publication of Life Sentences and I'd Know You Anywhere is one of the longest in my career. So I feel I should try to provide more fresh content here on the website, old-fashioned as it feels in these Tweeting, Facebooking, blogging times. Read more [...]

Win an advance copy of I'D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE. Read more [...]

I've been spending a lot of time in New Orleans lately. No, I have not -- and will not -- forsake Baltimore, and I still spend more time there than anywhere else. But, for now, I have two hometowns and I am doing my best to get to know the new one, primarily by bicycle. Read more [...]

In the final days of August, I met Ian Rankin at the Oxford Bar, trying to conceal my fangirl glee. The Oxford Bar! Rebus's hangout! With Rebus's creator! I'm not going to lie, I felt pretty cool, although I know that Rankin, a gracious sort, has invited many writers to his favorite bar. Read more [...]

Over the past three months, every time I thought about updating the website, I froze. I tried and rejected various entries, for a series of reasons that sounded like a new variation on the seven dwarves: Grumpy, Silly, Bitchy, Perky, Sleepy, Melancholy and Medicated. Read more [...]

And what do we have when a writer who has had considerably less success than John Updike or Augusten Burroughs decides to write about a writer who has had the kind of success that Augusten Burroughs has, and opens with a chapter about said writer on book tour? Read more [...]

It was a disease peculiar to the 80s, as I recall. Reporters everywhere wanted to do what Amistad Maupin had done with Tales of the City in the San Francisco Examiner, or copy Cyra McFaddden’s The Serial. At the San Antonio Light, a coworker and I even wrote a proposal about -– I think –- a local real estate agent and, maybe, a murder, although I might be confusing our concept with what someone else actually executed in another newspaper. Read more [...]