Another year of joyous reading!  What could be better?

I love to hear how an author creates his or her novel.  Some of these stories are as good as the book itself.  At the annual Morristown Festival of Books held on Friday, Oct. 13, and Saturday, Oct. 14, 2017, I got a chance to listen to Lincoln Child and Tess Gerritsen speak to a packed crowd at St. Peter’s in Morristown about their books and characters and about themselves. Gerritsen has been dubbed the “medical suspense queen,” by Publishers Weekly with 30 million books sold. Her 27 novels include the Rizzoli and Isles crime series, Gravity and her latest I Know a Secret. Child is also a New York Times bestselling author, both individually, and with his co-author, Douglas Preston, for the Pendergast series. His latest book is Full Wolf Moon.

Child began his career as an editor then switched tracks becoming a systems engineer at MetLife. After a few years of programming, Child began writing. He is a New York Times best-selling author of his own books as well as a co-author with Douglas Preston on the Pendergast series.

The series protagonist, Pendergast, is a modern-day Sherlock Holmes. With his quirky traits and a surreal quality that almost defies logic, Pendergast is my type of superhero – a smart one. Child and Preston first collaborated on Relic which became the first in the series of novels. In Relic, Pendergast is an FBI agent who works with a NY detective to find out who or what is killing people in the American Museum of Natural History. (more…)