Kathleen George chats with Big Thrill contributing editor Janice Gable Bashman about The Odds, George's fourth thriller that has focused on Pittsburgh homicide detectives.

Entertainment Weekly states, "If anyone's writing better police thrillers than George, I don't know who is."

Give us a quick run-down on The Odds and what makes it such a fascinating read.

I show what the police are doing, how they are working a case, but I also track the criminals and the victims. The reader is in the cat-bird seat, seeing everything, making the connections, and it can get very tense when the reader watches the police almost catching up to something or a victim making a bad decision. I love those big tapestries in which you see many stories unfolding. In this novel I have several versions of "motherless children" - which is one of my themes throughout all my work. I'm interested in people who missed out on nurturing and in children who become adults before their time.

My police characters have that in their history. Commander Christie had to be the support for his mother when she was abandoned by his father. As a result, he takes on a paternal role with almost everyone. The effect at the office and with the families of victims is that almost everyone ends up with a crush on him. His novice detective Colleen Greer has that particular form of magic too. She had unattentive parents. She made up for it with charm and will, so people get crushes on her, too.

But I think the main ingredient the EW reviewer refers to is the tension between the stories - the police working hard but the worlds of characters unraveling at the same time.

Four abandoned kids are at the center of your story. Tell us about them and why we want to know them.

I fell in love with these characters as I wrote them. They've had really rough breaks - they're orphans abandoned by their step-mother, but they're extremely smart in a number of ways. They're alert, well-read, and at the top of their classes in school. So this smartness and sense of responsibility both help and harm them. They are able to get away with being on their own. They're so good at it that people don't notice. That's frightening. Because they still need things - food, clothes, basic things. And they need adult attention. But a tricky thing I discovered about them as I wrote them was that they still had a capacity for love. For each other, for others. They're immensely generous kids.