You spent 20 years writing for television before turning to writing books full time.  Did your earlier writing career enhance your current one?

I am certain it did.  I had written two or three books before I became involved in television scriptwriting.  Apart from the fact that the scriptwriting paid better, it taught me to write dialogue in a way that few novelists ever seem to master.  When I finally returned to writing books, I found that I was able to carry so much more plot and character through my dialogue than I was ever able to do before.  When I look at my early work now, I cringe at the dialogue.

Virtually Dead is set in the online virtual world of Second Life.  Can you give us some insight into how you got to know this world well enough to write about it?  And does your unusual setting act as a character in itself?  Friend?  Villain?

I spent nearly a year as a denizen of Second Life, getting to know it inside out, before putting pen to paper.  My SL avatar is called Flick Faulds, and he set up an SL detective agency to help me research the dark underbelly of this virtual world.  In fact, Flick received an incredible number of cases - ranging from stalking to infidelity and everything that you might be able to imagine in between.

I also created an avatar of the main character who was to feature in the book - Chas Chesnokov, a Brad Pit lookalike - and I recently shot a book trailer in Second Life, featuring Chas and some of the other characters.  You can take a look at it here, on Youtube.  Second Life itself is, of course, THE major character in the book.  Neither hero nor villain, but fascinating in itself, and always unpredictable.  In fact, the only predictable thing about SL is its citizens' obsession with sex, which is sometimes sad and sometimes funny.  It was something which I felt I had to reflect in the book to give it authenticity.

Snakehead, one of your Chinese thrillers (another series), recently won a French literary award where the panel of judges were French penitentiary prisoners.  It is indeed "an accolade for a crime writer to get the thumbs up from criminals."  What do you think appealed to this panel in your writing?

It is difficult to know what appeals to criminals about crime books - unless, of course, the villain gets away with it  (which he doesn't, in this case).  There were six other books shortlisted for this award, all written by French writers.  I was the only foreigner.  As a condition of accepting the nomination, I had to go and talk to groups of prisoners in several French prisons.  A number of them had read the book, and talked very intelligently about plot and character.  I guess that when you have so much time on your hands, you have the opportunity to devote yourself to reading in a way that most of us never could.  Most of the prisoners whom I spoke to were avid readers - not just of crime books, but of many different genres, and would make great critics!

What will we be seeing from you in the future?  How do you decide which series to work on next?

The next series from me will be a short one - a trilogy, in fact.  The first has already been published in French ("L'île des chasseurs d'oiseaux" - Island of the Bird Hunters), but won't appear in the UK and the US until January 2011.  The book, whose English title is The Blackhouse, has been snapped up all over Europe, and I have just signed a three-book deal with a very prestigious UK publisher for the trilogy.  It is a complete change from my previous work - more novel than crime (although the story is still predicated upon a crime).  It is what the French would call a roman noir, and is an absolute return to my Scottish roots, with the story set on the windswept Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.

New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Karen Harper has been published for 25 years.  She is the winner of the 2006 Mary Higgins Clark Award.  A former college and high school English instructor, Harper currently writes contemporary suspense for Mira Books and historical novels for Putnam.  She and her husband divide their time between Columbus, Ohio and Naples, Florida.

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