Disappearing Act

How do you become a new person?

In Thomas Perry's newest thriller, Silence, private investigator and retired LAPD detective, Jack Till, helps Wendy Harper, a restaurant owner, start a new life after assailants beat her up with a baseball bat.

Harper doesn't know who assaulted her yet she refuses police protection. Instead, she takes on a new identity to escape danger. Using techniques Till learned as a police officer, he shows her how to disappear. Once she's gone, people assume she was murdered.

"The issue of identity is something I've been working on and writing about for the past 25 years," says Perry.

Turns out changing one's identity isn't a guarantee against future problems.

Six years later, someone is trying to frame Harper's business partner and occasional boyfriend. To prove his innocence, Till must bring Harper back and show that she's alive. He figures out how to find her-she's married with kids-then has to convince her to return, while eluding Paul and Sylvia Turner, who have been hired to kill her when she reappears.

Who do you become when you change the physical aspects of identity? asks Perry. What does an identity consist of? What is the huge freight of past, temperament and aspiration that makes people who they are? Says Perry: "I'm fascinated by the idea of taking people out of their lives and taking on new lives."

Thomas Perry won the Edgar award for his novel, The Butcher's Boy and its sequel, Sleeping Dogs. His novel, Metzger's Dog, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Born in Tonawanda, New York, he received a B.A. from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Rochester. He has worked as a park maintenance man, factory laborer, commercial fisherman, university administrator and teacher, and a writer and producer of prime time network television shows. You can read an excerpt of Silence here. Go to the link and scroll halfway down the page.