Animal Court follows a group of animals in an African jungle who put a human man on trial for extensive environmental damage. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

There are so many court shows on television: Judge Judy, Divorce Court, and Judge Steve Harvey. What if animals had the same playing field? What if they were able to take a person or company to court for the damages they had incurred against nature? That question began my journey into writing Animal Court.

I was also inspired by a true African tribal practice. When one tribesman misbehaved, the others did not punish him. Instead, they gathered in the center of the tribal territory, formed a circle, and asked their fellow member to stand in the center. One by one, the tribesmen reminded the stray of the good he had done throughout his life, eventually allowing him to come to terms that he merely strayed.

We wondered how animals would treat a human if they could put one on trial. If they won the case, would they drag him into the jungle and tear him apart? This whetted our imagination and got us started.

What were some ideas that were important for you to personify in your characters?

An early fondness for wildlife coupled with a growing awareness of the plight of the natural world – wildlife, water, land, trees, and so on – prompted us to take a look at these dire circumstances from a different perspective. By giving voice to animals, some of which face endangerment or extinction, we tried to understand their problems, which, for the most part, are manmade. Some animals were shy; others more aggressive, depending a lot on the circumstances that brought them to testify in the trial.

We thought it was important to make the animal participants in the courtroom portray themselves according to what we know about the animals; for instance, the wolf as the prosecuting attorney or the lion as one of the judges. Each carried his or her own unique weight in relating their fears and hopes in a courtroom setting.

Was it important for you to deliver a moral to readers, or was it circumstantial to delivering an effective novel?

We certainly did not set out to deliver a moral. I think as the trial progressed, however, with some heartrending testimonies – the young giraffe orphaned due to the sport shooting of its mother, the young elephant torn from its family to perform slave labor, the humble ant whose domain was poisoned by insecticides, a mahogany tree lamenting the deforestation around it, the indiscriminate killing of sea lions – it seemed only natural that a moral would emerge.

What is your next book, and when will it be available?

Sunrise Over Casablanca is a post-World War II saga with the same group of characters from the classic film Casablanca and our first sequel Brazzaville. At stake is the pending collapse of Western Europe and the efforts made by the Americans to stabilize her prior to the Marshall Plan. Sunrise Over Casablanca deals with the Greek Civil War and both British and American involvement as well as the struggles of Morocco and Algeria to gain independence from French colonial rule.

We tend to believe that there was nothing going on in the world after WWII until Korea, but the world never stopped fighting after Germany and Japan were beaten. We see how our characters – Rick Blaine, Ilsa Lund Blaine, Louis Renault, and Sam – develop in a rapidly changing world and how they meet those challenges.

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