Reporting tells us what happened; fiction asks why it matters.
Up to 2020, I wrote bestselling true-crime books like THE DARKEST NIGHT and SHADOWMAN. Then COVID-19 shut down my field research and forced me to rethink storytelling. Courthouses went dark. Nobody talked to strangers. Hotels and libraries shuttered their doors. I couldn’t fly to the scenes of crimes; even pumping gas was an ordeal. I had spent decades following the pulse of real human darkness, tracking killers, interviewing victims, tracing betrayals that left entire communities gasping. Suddenly, just silence.
That pause became the crucible in which DEAF ROW (and the upcoming DEEP END) were forged, a space where fictional cases rise from the architecture of real crime, proof that truth and imagination are rarely separate.
As a newspaperman, I had always believed in the raw authority of facts. The names, dates, and documents were sacred; the chaos of human behavior was a puzzle to be decoded, not embellished. But as the world shut down around me, I realized that reality, even at its most vivid, could only take me so far. There were limits to what I could witness, limits to the access I could have, and limits to what even the most rigorous reporting could reveal about the interior lives of those who choose darkness. Fiction became the only way to probe those inner rooms fully, to step inside minds and hearts that no witness could ever allow me to see.
Coming May 5
Writing DEEP END felt like walking a tightrope between fidelity and freedom. Each fictional case is anchored in real crimes I had covered—murders that shocked me, betrayals that lingered like a stain—but I allowed myself to enter spaces that reporting could never reach: the fleeting thoughts before a decision to betray, the quiet regrets in the hours after, the subtle moral compromises that ripple outward unseen. Imagination became a lens, sharper than memory alone, revealing the architecture of choice in ways that transcripts and depositions never could.
Yet the tension between truth and invention is never fully resolved. I find that the more deeply I immerse myself in fiction, the more the real world pushes back. Details resurface: a fragment of a conversation, the precise cadence of a confession, a gesture I cannot unsee. These fragments demand fidelity, even as the story bends them into narrative shape. In the end, the line between fact and fiction is porous, a permeable membrane through which human behavior flows, unpredictable and strange.
COVID gave me a paradoxical gift: the pause I feared would idle my work became an invitation to examine the stories I had already gathered, to reflect on why they mattered, and to imagine how they might live on in a different form. Fiction does not betray truth; it distills it. It allows me to explore moral landscapes that reality can only hint at, to see the hidden scaffolding beneath human choice, to test the limits of empathy and understanding.
I haven’t left nonfiction behind. My reporting informs every sentence; the textures of reality—the smells, the gestures, the fleeting contradictions of human nature—remain my compass. But fiction has taught me that truth is not only what happens, but how it is experienced, remembered, and interpreted. And in that space between fact and invention, I find both the freedom to tell the stories that haunt me and the courage to ask the questions reality never fully answers: How much of darkness resides in each of us? How do ordinary lives fracture under pressure? And what does it mean, ultimately, to witness, to remember, and to imagine?
COVID-19 took away the streets, the courtrooms, the immediacy of real-time reporting. But it gave me something equally vital: a place to enter the minds of those who could not speak for themselves, a way to render human complexity in full, and a reminder that, whether through truth or story, the pursuit of understanding is relentless, necessary, and never-ending.