Conspiracy theories have always fascinated me," says Wilson, "how they're triggered and how they take on a life of their own. Theories involving Pearl Harbor, UFOs, satanic ritual abuse, New World Order, etc. all have their faithful adherents. It was only natural that a mind-numbing shocker like the attack on the Trade Towers would generate its own mythology. Stumbling into a 9/11 Truther website was the spark for Ground Zero. The way the towers collapsed like a controlled demotion added high-octane fuel to the fire that became the 9/11 Truth Movement. Perusing the Truther scenarios unveiled all sorts of mysterious and fascinating events leading up to that day. Just a week before the attacks the Chicago Options Exchange saw huge spikes in puts on American and United--the airlines used by the hijackers. A few people seemed to know that their stocks would tumble and were cashing in. I wove a lot of tasty bits like that into Ground Zero."

Wilson has his own technique for story generation: "I take something hackneyed and turn it upside down and inside out. For instance, in The Keep, I took the old vampire bit of pretending to be a normal human to hide its true parasitic self. But what if what you think is a vampire is only pretending to be one because it's really something so much worse that you'd feel more comfortable with a vampire? I did the same with the 9/11 conspiracy theories--which, depending on what variation you choose, point to Big Oil, Wall Street, Dick Cheney, or the New World Order as the string pullers behind the attacks. I used an organization even bigger, older, and more evil as the real instigator, and they've planted false clues and bogus evidence to keep investigators and conspiracy theorists looking in every direction but the right one."

F. Paul Wilson has more than eight million copies of his books in print in the US and his work has been translated into twenty-four languages. His latest thrillers, By the Sword and Ground Zero, star urban mercenary Repairman Jack. Jack: Secret Histories recently kicked off a young-adult series starring a fourteen-year-old Jack. Paul resides at the Jersey Shore and can be found on the Web at www.repairmanjack.com.

Sibylle Barrasso's private eye novel DARK WATERS is set in Boston. She was twice a finalist in the St. Martins Press Best First Private Eye Novel Contest, received an award from Sue Grafton at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, and was a contributing author of BAD BOYS AND BAD GIRLS IN THE BADLANDS, a critical anthology about mysteries set in the Southwest.