Linda M. Castellitto

Cool new city (San Francisco), fun new apartment (converted cable car), impressive new job (medical examiner): On paper, Dr. Jessie Teska’s got a lot to look forward to. But in reality, she’s still struggling to move past the painful breakup that prompted her to leave L.A.—and it’s not long before her challenging and interesting new job plops her right in the path of murderous criminals.

Married co-authors Dr. Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell first partnered on the New York Times bestselling memoir Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner. Now, they’re back with First Cut, which kicks off a new thriller series. We talked with the duo about how they work together, what makes medical examiners so fascinating and how to maintain a sense of humor while working an extraordinarily tough job.

You’re married, have three children, co-wrote a New York Times bestselling memoir about Dr. Melinek’s training at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City—and now, you’re launching a new thriller series. Congratulations! How do you best work together? Do you, say, collaborate via email, or sit together and take turns talking and typing, or etc.? Can you share a bit about how you get into writerly sync?
We collaborate in a variety of ways. Our first book, the memoir Working Stiff, was nonfiction, and the process of writing it helped us find our voice as co-authors of the detective novel series we are launching with First Cut. Other than that, though, the process of writing that book was entirely different from the process we have adopted when working together on medical-examiner fiction.

When we first start shaping the story for a novel, we go on a lot of walks together and talk out what we know has already happened, what’s going to happen and how we can get there. When it comes time to put things on paper, we sit down together and brainstorm into a long, messy outline.

Then we divide roles for a while. Judy continues her day job as a forensic pathologist, performing autopsy death investigation in the real world, while T.J. molds our story into the beats, scenes and acts that form a detective novel. When he gets stuck, we brainstorm again—at that point, often by email or text. Once the rough draft is on paper, Judy will read it out loud and we will both make changes based on what we hear. Our books are written from a first-person point of view and our protagonist, Dr. Jessie Teska, has a strong personality that is best explored out loud while we’re composing the manuscript.

Dr. Melinek, you’re the forensics expert, and T.J., you’ve worked in the film business as a writer and editor. Do you essentially divide your authorial duties along those lines, too? How would you say your work informs your writing, or vice versa? Do either of you get veto power over particular aspects of character or story?
As co-authors—and married ones—we’re fortunate in this way: We have no overlapping skill set. Judy has, in her 20 years of experience as a forensic pathologist, seen it all. She has the stories about deaths we can fictionalize in the frame of our detective novels. The science you read in our books is real. Dr. Jessie Teska’s investigative methods are as close as you will find in a mystery or thriller to the way real medical examiners work with cops, district attorneys, clinical physicians, lab professionals and the whole range of specialists and experts in the death-investigation system.

Writing fiction is T.J.’s domain. He loves to sit in a room and wrestle with words all day. He loves to agonize over commas. He really does. Judy has the stories and T.J. has the time and the drive to craft them. That’s how we collaborate as co-authors.

Neither of us steps on the other’s toes all that often; not in a way we can’t resolve. When we do come to a storytelling impasse, Judy might declare a veto over a scientific or investigative method, or T.J. might declare one over a structural element of the narrative. Honestly, though, these vetoes are rare.

One of Jessie’s colleagues reminds her that they work within a legal system, not a justice system. It’s a poignant truth that, alas, not every criminal will be jailed, let alone caught or prosecuted. But Jessie tries her hardest, sometimes at great personal cost. Is that something that’s meaningful to you—exploring the conflict that can arise between wanting to excel at a job vs. doing what feels right, or between longing for closure vs. accepting it’s not in the cards?
Jessie’s watchword is integrity. She is a noir detective of the old school, one who pursues the truth about the cases she investigates with a doggedness that steps over into recklessness. The word autopsy means “see for yourself,” and that’s exactly what Dr. Jessie Teska does, no matter the consequences to herself.

But when the consequences of her unrelenting search for the truth start to affect other people in her life? Well, that’s when things get dirty and hard. That’s what we’re here, as storytellers, to give you!

“The real world of forensic pathology can be, at times, fully absurd.”

There’s plenty of funny stuff in your book, not least a memorably and hilariously gross weapon used in a physical fight. It’s got to be a delicate balance—everyone needs humor to cope with the vagaries of work life, but not everyone is doing such difficult work while being held accountable to so many. Did your own personal experience with that push-pull inform your desire/decision to explore it in your novel?
The real world of forensic pathology can be, at times, fully absurd. The truth surely is stranger than fiction, and sometimes the awful, weird and unexpected circumstances of an unforeseen death can be so dark as to become, yes, funny. One thing we hope we never do in the course of our books, though, is the one thing that Dr. Melinek and her colleagues assiduously do not do: We do not mock the dead. The gallows humor you see in TV dramas does not represent the attitude that the best forensic professionals take toward their job in the morgue.

San Francisco serves as the backdrop to Jessie’s new life: She’s got to adjust to the persistent fog, make a home in a converted cable car and go on work calls all over the city. What is it about San Francisco (besides, perhaps, excellent taco places) that made you choose it as the setting for First Cut?
Write what you know! T.J. comes from Nahant, Massachusetts, a fishing town north of Boston (and next door to Lynn, our protagonist’s hometown), and Judy is an immigrant to the United States who grew up in the Bronx. We moved together to California for work a long time ago, and have lived in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond District for 15 years. We fell immediately and passionately in love with the city. Judy held Jessie’s job as an assistant medical examiner at the San Francisco Office of Chief Medical Examiner for nine years, and today works in an adjacent county. Her description of the morgue in the basement of the Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant Street is taken from her own experience. That morgue isn’t there anymore—there’s a brand new facility that forms the backdrop of Dr. Teska’s adventures in the next book in the series, Cross Cut. We’ve fictionalized here and there, but, for the most part, the facilities where Dr. Teska performs death investigation are just like the ones where Dr. Melinek did the same.

Female medical examiners have been the stars of popular book and TV series with beloved characters like Kay Scarpetta, Temperance Brennan, Maura Isles, Jordan Cavanaugh and more. Why, do you think, this particular profession makes for such enduringly appealing material for storytelling? Are there any persistent tropes that you wanted to upend, or have fun with, in First Cut?
Judy has a popular blog post at PathologyExpert.com called 7 CSI Fails. Among them: Don’t wear high heels (Louboutins?!) to a crime scene. Lab tests take time. Someone turn on the lights!

Now, Dr. Teska is not Dr. Melinek. Jessie makes some bad choices that Judy definitely would not, and Judy’s life is nowhere near as convoluted as Jessie’s. We enjoy taking Judy’s real experiences in her work life and twisting them, just enough, to have fun on the page.

The equipment in Jessie’s lab is frustratingly vintage, but your Bitcoin-centric subplot is decidedly of our cultural moment. What about Bitcoin caught your fancy, in terms of making it an element of your novel?
That’s a theme in the book: the disconnect between the high-tech ecosystem of Silicon Valley and the disconcertingly low-tech city morgue. Our fictional medical examiner employs many of the same tools as her professional forebears did a century ago. Like Dr. Melinek, Dr. Teska uses scalpels to slice through tissue, kitchen knives to bread loaf organs and hardware store tree loppers to cut ribs. Modern forensic pathology may require DNA and advanced toxicologic analysis to ensure convictions, but the process starts with basic medicine and very basic tools.

In addition to the outdated equipment, Jessie’s office also suffers from understaffing, underfunding and a lack of oversight. This, of course, increases stress and pressure, opportunities for error, etc. In your experience, are these problems common at M.E. facilities? Over your years in and writing about the forensics field, have you seen potential for improvement, facilities that’ve employed new approaches to temper these issues, that sort of thing?
The understaffing and underfunding of medical examiner and coroner systems is a nationwide problem. Currently only around 1 percent of medical students go into the field of pathology, and fewer still take the additional year of fellowship training to become forensic pathologists. There are only around 500 board-certified forensic pathologists like Dr. Teska in the United States. That’s half the number we need to cover our country’s current death-investigation workload, and that workload is growing.

Funding for forensic services is done on a county level, and the county’s dead don’t vote. So forensic labs and morgues are frequently the victims of government cutbacks during lean times, and rarely the recipient of financial investment in a good economy. In Dr. Melinek’s career she has not seen much improvement in this cycle. Our fiction reflects this funding crisis and its consequences—as bent through a noir lens.

“. . . when your heroine is a medical examiner, your books are chock full of corpses.”

With the intricacies of Jessie’s job and relationships, the complexity of the various crimes and the countless medical details that feel so natural in First Cut, there must’ve been so, so much to keep track of as you created. Did you plan out the story, maybe even the series, before the writing began, or do you employ a more free-flowing approach?
When we start out, we riff—and then we outline. The impetus for First Cut came from a real case that Dr. Melinek investigated in San Francisco. A man is sitting in a cyber café with his laptop in front of him. Another man comes through the door (this is all captured on security cameras), looks around, and then grabs that laptop and runs for the door. The laptop’s owner pulls out a gun and starts shooting while he chases the thief. He corners him, kills him, takes the laptop back . . . and walks away.

When Dr. Melinek arrived at this scene as the on-call medical examiner and was told this story by the investigating homicide detectives while she stood over the dead body, the first thing she thought was, “What the hell is on that laptop that’s worth murdering somebody over?” That was the kernel for our story, the death that sets everything in motion.

In a gripping detective story, that motion necessarily includes a lot of parts. Once we had the rough idea of what the story was and where it would go, we worked up a series of auxiliary documents—a structural outline, a timeline, a character list. These are typical for any novelist. Less typical is our document called Dead Bodies Timeline. We need this last one because, when your heroine is a medical examiner, your books are chock full of corpses. Some of them are central to the mystery, some are incidental and some might even be diversionary. Gotta keep ’em straight!

We do have ideas for a series arc, but it’s highly flexible. That’s one of the perks of working in the death investigation field in real life: There’s no shortage of stories to explore in the realm of fiction.

Can you share anything about what’s coming up next for Jessie and her colleagues (and Bea the beagle)? And what’s coming up next for the two of you?
The second book in the series, Cross Cut is well underway, and will be coming to bookshelves and glow-screens and earphones in 2021. We don’t want to reveal too much, of course. We can tell you that Bea gets to go digging; that we get to listen in to a comically stilted phone call between Jessie and her mother; and that, along the way, people die.

It’s all in a day’s work.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of First Cut.

Author photo © Amal Bisharat.

Malcolm “Mal” Kershaw’s days are steeped in mystery. He’s a constant reader and recommender of the genre and, after many years as a bookseller, now co-owns Old Devils Bookstore along with a mystery author. Mal’s home is austere, his routines simple, his days mostly ordinary. 

But then: FBI agent Gwen Mulvey shows up at the store to ask about three homicides reminiscent of those in Agatha Christie’s The A.B.C. Murders. Years ago, Mal wrote a blog post about “the cleverest, the most ingenious, the most foolproof . . . murders in crime fiction history,” a post that now seems to be serving as a checklist for a murderer whom Gwen must stop before he strikes again.

Like Mal, author Peter Swanson has a nigh encyclopedic knowledge of mysteries, thanks to his own years spent working in bookstores. “I loved being a bookseller!” he says. “I’ve definitely had a lifelong love of reading, and I was always doing a little writing on the side. . . . I didn’t try my hand at a novel until I was deep into my 30s and didn’t get an agent until I was in my 40s, for the fourth book I’d written.”

That was The Girl With a Clock for a Heart, published in 2014. Eight Perfect Murders is his sixth book (and he’s got a couple more in the works). Thus far, all of Swanson’s books have been set in New England, where he grew up, went to college and now lives. When conjuring up Eight Perfect Murders, Swanson says he instantly gravitated toward Beacon Hill, “the beautiful section of Boston I live in. . . . It’s got narrow streets, high hills, cobblestones—that gothic mystery feel. Plus, I like my books to have seasons.”

Read our review of Before She Knew Him by Peter Swanson.

Mal’s life is in a decidedly wintry season. There’s wind and snow and a truly chilling feeling of impending doom taking root in his heart. He’s flattered that an FBI agent would seek his help, but also increasingly worried that she’ll find out he’s keeping secrets or, even worse, decide he’s a suspect. He maintains his evening rituals (music, beer, poetry) and daytime duties (managing staff, reshelving, feeding the bookstore cat) as he rereads the mysteries from his original blog post in search of clues. As the days pass and the pages turn, he becomes ever more paranoid; everyone he encounters seems a reasonable suspect, every plotline a complex yet viable real-life scenario.

Swanson says the idea for the book and its titular list bubbled up to the surface when he was walking around Walden Pond, not far from his home. “I’m a full-time writer,” he explains, “and I spend half my day writing and the other half taking a long walk somewhere. I was working out a short story and thinking, what are clever murder ideas in books, really clever ways to disguise what actually happened? I was thinking of this list, and then the book was just there. What if someone wrote it down and used it to commit real murders?”

“My own work is sort of Hitchcockian, with ordinary people who wind up in crime scenarios.”

Nearly the entire book was in Swanson’s head by walk’s end, which “was exciting, but also horrifying,” he says. “Now I’ve got to sit down and go sentence to sentence!” But before hitting the keyboard, Swanson dove into his list of books. “I wasn’t picking what I think are the best murder mysteries; I was thinking about clever crimes that disguised the murderer’s intent.”

The books he chose—and that Mal explores in his literary-detective adventures—include Patricia Highsmith’s classic Strangers on a Train, Donna Tartt’s blockbuster The Secret History and The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne, who’s best known as the creator of the adorable, nonmurderous Winnie-the-Pooh. 

“I love reading across the genre. And I think, even though I read procedurals that are steeped in forensic evidence, I don’t tend to gravitate toward writing them,” Swanson says. “My own work is sort of Hitchcockian, with ordinary people who wind up in crime scenarios. I’m much more interested in people who are in the gray area between criminal and noncriminal, murderer and nonmurderer, and how people get from one to the other.”

Fortunately, crafting such macabre tales while immersing himself in murderers’ minds hasn’t adversely affected Swanson’s psyche. “Generally, I’m fine!” he says, laughing. “I gravitate toward dark stuff, whether it’s movies, TV or what I write, but it doesn’t really affect me.”

As a reader, he’s been interested in the scarier stuff since childhood. “I don’t know why I was attracted to creepier books as a kid, but I was just like Malcolm was. I was probably 11 or 12, and my parents had beach books around the house, like Coma and Jaws. Once I read them, I was like, ‘This is what I want to read!’ I was hooked.” 

Readers are sure to be hooked on Eight Perfect Murders, too. It’s a thrill to discover how Swanson braids the various books’ plots together as Malcolm grows ever more uneasy, the murderer ever bolder and the FBI ever more suspicious. And then there’s the story’s fulsome bibliophilia, from its book-loving characters to Malcolm’s expert and thoughtful literary musings—the perfect murder list itself is a ready-made TBR, with more titles and authors mentioned as the action unfolds. Because clever crimes and tension aside, Eight Perfect Murders is really about the joys (and dangers) of being a reader.

Author photo © Jim Ferguson.

Millers Kill is a picturesque small town in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York. But as any mystery aficionado knows, even lovely leafy settings have a dark side—like two unsolved murders, one in 1952, the other in 1972. And then, in the present, Millers Kill Police Chief Russ van Alstyne learns it’s happened again. There is yet another murder with the same confounding characteristics: The victim is a beautiful young woman wearing a new dress, her purse and ID are missing and there are no bodily indications of what caused her untimely demise.

We talked to author Julia Spencer-Fleming about Hid From Our Eyes, her newest novel featuring Russ and his wife, Episcopalian priest Clare Fergusson, in which secrets from the past taint the future, politics and money loom large and the MKPD is racing to solve the crime before the police department is defunded and the killer gets away with it—again.

Congratulations on your new book! It’s been about nine years since your last Clare-and-Russ novel, Through the Evil Days. Did you revisit your previous books, delve into your notes, etc., to get yourself back into the mindset of your characters and their community?
I did all of those to reacquaint myself with Clare and Russ and the people of Millers Kill! One thing that helped a lot was relistening to the audiobooks with their wonderful narrator, Suzanne Toren. There’s something about listening rather than reading that allows me to experience the words in a fresh way, which in turn enables me to tune in to aspects of the characters that I might let my eye skip over if I was reading on paper.

In creating Millers Kill, you did such a wonderful job evoking the feeling of the Adirondacks, from the mountainous backdrop to the use of the word “camp” to refer to what’s often quite a large house. What is it about the area that made it feel like the ideal setting for your stories? Do you visit often as a refresher, or is the area vivid in your mind?
Although I’ve lived in Maine for 30 (mumble) years now, I’m originally from that part of New York, and having spent many of my growing-up years there, certain aspects are so deeply embedded I could probably write convincingly about the area even if I moved to Paris and never came back again! However, I do go back regularly to keep the sights and sounds and smells at the front of my brain. In addition to visiting, I try to keep a hand in with research and current events, so I’m not accidentally describing places as they were in 1979. Writing about Saratoga, for instance, requires me to update my memories, because the town has changed almost beyond recognition from when I was a girl.

I enjoy digging up the answers to questions and reading histories, so that part’s not hard, but the real pinch comes in knowing what you don’t know.

The goings-on in the book take place across decades, and while key aspects of police work (analyzing clues, following leads, conducting interviews) remain the same, medicine and technology have advanced in so many ways. Was it difficult to keep track of all of your characters while also remaining true to each era? Did you do lots of research about the specifics, perhaps with a police chief, medical examiner or the like on speed-dial?
I was fortunate enough to be able to call on a detective, a doctor and a pharmacist with specific questions for Hid From Our Eyes, and I did a lot of research into the details of life in the early 1950s and 1970s. I enjoy digging up the answers to questions and reading histories, so that part’s not hard, but the real pinch comes in knowing what you don’t know. I have friends like Rhys Bowen who exclusively write historical fiction, and I am in awe of their ability to nail the research and turn in books on time!

Tracking the changes of various characters as they grew older was much easier for me, in part because I tend to have fairly detailed biographies of major characters at the ready. So I knew a lot about Russ and his mother Margy, and about police chiefs Jack Liddle and Harry McNeil, who appeared in an earlier book in the series.

You went to college for art and acting, and you also have your J.D. Did you work as a lawyer before you became an author? What made you want to transition to the writing life? Do you think your studies in the arts and the law influence how and what you write?
I used to joke that law school taught me what NOT to write, but that’s not really fair. Despite centuries of jokes, good legal writing requires the “ABCs”—accuracy, brevity and clarity. Those aren’t bad habits for a novelist to pick up. Acting and theater, interestingly, have continued to prove useful, as the same techniques I learned for creating characters on stage are the ones I use for creating characters on the page. As for why I left the law to become a full-time writer? The money, obviously.

People interacting with them tended to stop at the uniform—a badge for him, a collar for her—and not see the real human underneath.

Both Russ and Clare are veterans who have experienced PTSD, and they’ve both chosen professions that require discretion and dignity. Do you think that’s a big part of what makes them work so well together as a couple and as parents?
The similarities of their professions are definitely what initially drew them together. People interacting with them tended to stop at the uniform—a badge for him, a collar for her—and not see the real human underneath. And, of course, they did see each other as fully human from the start.

One piece of writing has always been in my mind while writing these books: Leonard Cohen’s famous lyric, “There is a crack, a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” Russ and Clare are people who have been broken, they have broken each other, and cherishing their brokenness makes everything about them a little richer and more tender. I love the fact that they both clash with and complement each other. Without that, my novels would be shorter and a lot more dull.

Clare is an Episcopal priest, and your books’ titles are drawn from Episcopalian hymns. What does religion mean to you, in terms of your writing? Was it important to you to create characters who coexist lovingly, even if they have different views on faith?
One of the reasons the starting point for my series was Clare Fergusson was because I wanted to explore questions I had about my own faith. How do we act as believing people in a largely secular world? What does it mean to be the hands and feet of God? How, if you’re called on to love and forgive, do you love the unlovable and forgive the unforgivable? I also wanted to share my view of religion—that it’s OK to be scared, to doubt, to screw up—and, in a time when “Christian” increasingly is defined by narrow-mindedness and exclusion, to show people what my church is like: open minded, radically welcoming, progressive.

At the same time, it was also very important to me to make sure readers of any faith, or none, could connect with my characters. The last thing I wanted to do was preach. So there’s Russ, somewhere on the agnostic/atheist border, and Clare respects and honors his point of view. She doesn’t hide her beliefs, and she never tries to change his. You have Kevin Flynn, who’s probably a lapsed Catholic because he sleeps in on Sunday, and Hadley Knox, who goes to church because she thinks it’s good for her kids. In other words, I try to portray a picture of American religion as it’s actually experienced in a lot of Northern Kingdom/New England small towns.

Relationships between mentors and proteges figure prominently in Hid From Our Eyes. Russ mentors and supports his officers, Clare does the same for her new intern and police chiefs of the past offer wisdom and support to those next in line. Can you share your thoughts on the value of this sort of relationship?
It was something I started thinking about when raising my middle child, my son. I had never really seen a boy growing up before; my brother is nine years younger than I am and I was off to college well before his teen years. I came to realize, seeing my son and his friends, that while girls sort of fall into womanhood on their own, boys have to be taught to be men. They crave that relationship, from fathers or uncles or from mentors. The older and wiser person in the relationship has tremendous power, and I got to explore the use of that power for good and for ill in the book. And of course, there’s an echo of that idea in religion, in the idea of the initiate into sacred mysteries, which is where Clare comes in. All the while she feels she’s flailing around, doing “priesthood” wrong, she’s showing Joni and others, “This is what I do, you can do it too.”

Various characters in Hid From Our Eyes are struggling with difficulties from their past, like policewoman Hadley Knox, whose vindictive ex-husband is trying to cost her her job and custody of their kids, and Russ, who was a person of interest in the 1972 murder. Is this idea, how the past can have a hold on the present, something that intrigues you as you write your books ?
Oh, yes. “The past that won’t stay dead” appears again and again in my books. I used to say it came out of the context; small towns have long memories, and even after all the firsthand participants have passed, stories of memorable happenings and people continue to circulate. That’s still true, obviously, but now I also think it’s rooted in my own sense, as I get older, of just how much the past shapes each of us, and how hard it can be to move forward and break away from the events and individuals that have steered the course of our lives.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Hid From Our Eyes.

You kept your chapters short and your ending a cliffhanger, which definitely amps up the excitement and the page-turning! What’s your favorite kind of book to read? Do you enjoy mystery and suspense when you’re not the one creating it?
I love mysteries and thrillers—and cliffhangers!—and read a lot of it when, as you astutely put it, I’m not creating it. When I’m face down in a manuscript, it’s hard to delve into others’ mysteries; I find I either beat my breast in despair because my writing will never be as good as X’s, or the next day I write in some clever plot twist and then realize, oops! I just read that last night.

My other great love is science fiction. I’m actually a failed SF writer—my first attempt at a novel was a space opera. Terribly derivative and totally not what anyone was reading or selling back in the late ’90s. But the core of the plot was a murder on a space station, so my destiny was already apparent.

In the Bleak Midwinter, your first Russ-and-Clare book, was published in 2002. Has your approach to writing, and to your characters and their fictional world, changed since then? Do you think you’ll be writing about them for years to come?
I always thought the Millers Kill novels would be a five-book series, because the central story question was “Will they, or won’t they?” and how long can you stretch that out? Then I got to the point where I answered that question and discovered I had this large cast of layered, interesting characters to lay with, and wow, there were a LOT more stories I wanted to tell. Right now, I can see myself happy in Millers Kill for many more years.

My approach to writing since (ouch!) 2002? I’ve become a great deal more relaxed. I still plod through the middle of the book and agonize over wrapping up the ending and I’m always ping-ponging between complete conviction that I’m a hack or a genius, but I trust my process and choices much more than I did at the beginning. If I want to take a detour with a character or an event or a setting, I trust it will serve the greater story, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time. And I have an excellent editor, who’ll make me take it out if I’m deluding myself!

Is there anything else you want to share about Hid From Our Eyes, or anything else you may have in the works?
I hope everyone will take a peek at it—you can’t pick it up in a bookstore and thumb through the pages, but there are excerpts at Macmillan.com and at my blog, JungleRedWriters.com. Meanwhile, I’m working on the 10th Clare and Russ book, working title: At Midnight Comes the Cry. I don’t want to make my readers wait another six years to resolve the current cliffhanger!

Author photo by Geoff Green.