Sarah’s Reviews > Private Investigations: Mystery Writers on the Secrets, Riddles, and Wonders in Their Lives > Status Update

Steph Cha relates a frightening incident she experienced while living in her first apartment, and reflects upon the threats all women face from predatory men in their daily lives. In particular, she highlights the unfair way women tend to be judged for “freezing” or choosing not to report threatening or violent incidents.

Rachel Howzell Hall gives a moving account of her struggles to publish her second and subsequent novels, while at the same time she faced a series of serious health setbacks during her 30s.

Rhys Bowen explores her preoccupation with wartime experiences (she was a young child during WW2) and her reasoning for incorporating such material into her novels.

Lynn Cahoon ponders the question of why some women, herself included, are susceptible to the charms of deceptive and predatory men.

Kristen Lepionka describes a series of eerie experiences that she had in an apartment where she once lived in Columbus, Ohio.

Jacqueline Winspear explores why war and the lingering effects of war make such compelling subjects for fiction, and explains why, for her, the why? is more enthralling than the who? when it comes to crime and mystery.

Zehanet Khan has incorporated many of these family links and recollections into her mystery novels featuring Pashtun detective Esa Khattak.

British-born American lawyer and author Ausma Zehanet Khan explores the mysterious origins of her Pashtun Muslim family, from her parents’ beginnings in ShahJahanpur, northern India, to their forced migration to Pakistan following Partition, her cultural roots in Afghanistan, to retracing the route of an epic road trip across West Asia to the Khyber Pass that the family undertook when she was a child.

William Kent Krueger describes the personal catharsis he experienced while writing his novel Ordinary Grace, a process that enabled him to gain an understanding and empathy for the plight of his late mother, who experienced several periods of psychiatric illness during Krueger’s childhood and adolescence.

Martin Limon recalls his fascination with a beautiful and mysterious foreign culture, while deployed in South Korea as a young American G.I.