Tell us more about Jonathan Grave - he seems a complex and intriguing character.

Jonathan Grave--Digger to his friends--is the kind of man I think I always wanted to be.   A former Delta Force operator, he is now the president of Security Solutions, a private investigations firm that has a covert side: hostage rescue.  If your loved one is taken, you simply want them back.  You don't care about collecting evidence for trial, and you certainly don't care about Miranda rights and search warrants.  You just want them returned to you whole and healthy.  That's when you call Jonathan Grave.

Born to illegal wealth, Jonathan donated his inheritance to St. Katherine's Catholic Church to establish Resurrection House, a home for children of incarcerated parents.  Not a particularly spiritual man, he nonetheless has a solid sense of right and wrong that doesn't necessarily jibe with the law.  He is not a vigilante, and he is not an assassin.  If the people he pursues would surrender their hostages peacefully, he would be--and occasionally is--perfectly willing to zip-tie their hands and leave without a shot fired, his precious cargo in tow.  On the other hand, if the bad guys resist, he won't hesitate to ruin their day.  Everything is secondary to fulfilling his mission of reuniting families.

In No Mercy, after a fairly routine rescue operation erupts in gunfire, Jonathan inadvertently threatens a secret that people in the highest places on both sides of the law will do anything to protect.   When they take vengeance on someone Jonathan loves, they cross a line from which there is no return.  If I wrote the book properly, few readers will condone what Jonathan does next, but they'll cheer him for doing it.

How did the idea for this book come to you? How much did writing Six Minutes to Freedom inspire you to do this book?

Six Minutes to Freedom is the true story of Kurt Muse, the only civilian of record ever rescued by Delta Force.  I won't go into all the details here, but suffice to say it was a huge success for these covert operators, and because Kurt is such a deeply good man, he and his rescuers continue to be very close.  Through him, I was able to gain access to quite a few of those very special warriors.  To a man, I found them to be the ultimate professionals who are capable of extreme violence--but only if they are driven to violence by their adversaries.

Combining what I learned from the Delta operators with my own personal experience in the fire service (putting the mission above oneself), the idea of Jonathan Grave occurred to me fully formed in a flash of inspiration when my wife and I were shopping for a lamp at Dulles Electric Supply in Northern Virginia.  When an idea comes to you with that kind of velocity, you know you've got something worth pursuing.

Which writers have been most influential for you?

Here's where I disappoint people and rob myself of any chance of a writer-in-residence gig at a university (a life goal of mine).  I am not a fan of the "classics" of literature.  I never have been, because those stories never resonated with me.  Even now, I have a hard time reading so-called literary fiction because the stifling language and broad narrative ejects me from the story.  I like good stories well-told, and well-told means in a vernacular that I can understand.  

I think Frederick Forsythe wrote the perfect thriller in The Day of the Jackal, which just happens to be the book that made me want to start writing thrillers.  A decade later, Thomas Harris reignited the spark with Red Dragon.  Stephen King does things with language that no other writer can.  'Salem's Lot and Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption are in themselves master classes in what the phrase "writer's voice" means.  But if I could change places with the one writer who I believe wrote the most perfect book ever written, it would have to be Harper Lee for To Kill A Mockingbird.  That book literally changed my life.

People are always intrigued by a writer's path to publication - tell us a bit about yours.

In school, I was that kid you hated because I flattened out the grading curve in English class. Telling stories is the only thing I've ever really been good at.  For a while, I thought I wanted to be a journalist, but after I tried that for a couple of years out of college I realized it wasn't for me, so I took a huge right turn into the arenas of safety engineering and firefighting.  Through it all, I continued to write, but only for my own pleasure.  I wrote stories the way that people tinker with cars in their garage.

After three books that I ended up not liking myself, I happened upon a short story I had written in college called Building 27, which fictionalized some things I'd experienced during research at a mental hospital near my alma mater in Williamsburg, Virginia.  At the time, I was doing some volunteer work that involved the local juvenile detention center, and the similarities between the two experiences were striking.  Just like I mentioned before, the idea for a story of a child wrongly imprisoned hit me like a fastball.  Within days, I'd finished the outline for what became Nathan's Run, my first published novel.  It made a big splash when it came out, and that teed up a whole career.

Look for copies of No Mercy in your book bags at Thrillerfest - you may get lucky!

Contributing editor, Clare Langley-Hawthorne, was raised in England and Australia. She was an attorney in Melbourne before moving to the United States, where she began her career as a writer. Her first novel, Consequences of Sin, has been nominated for the 2008 Sue Feder Memorial Historical Mystery Macavity award. The second in the Ursula Marlow series is The Serpent and The Scorpion. Clare lives in California with her family.