Frankie follows an AI woman that is shockingly lifelike who may be behind the strange murders that are showing up around town. What was the inspiration for the setup to your story?

Several years ago I dreamed about seeing a woman on the other side of a highway, wearing a raincoat, drifting along. Was she being chased? Wait, could she be a robot?? I liked the mystery, the many possibilities. Some people see this book as something you can solve in a minute but it’s not possible. We don’t know how the people die. We don’t know anything about motives. In my dream, the woman seemed to be running from something, and I carried that feeling into the book. Frankie, by the way, is not a villain. I doubt there is a sentence in the whole book suggesting any malevolence in Frankie.

Did you create an outline for the characters in the story before you started writing or did the characters personalities grow organically as you were writing?

Mainly, Simon falls in love with Frankie, whom he thinks is pursued by her husband (!); because one of the themes here is that things can go wrong, this being the name of Chapter 1. So Simon focuses on laying low and hiding her, exactly as other major characters want desperately to find her. Probability, whether high or low, is actually a theme throughout the book. A major character and his historical hero are big-time gamblers.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

The most important thing is the journey into the unknown, as that is a good description of AI. Every character in this book is drawn into a sort of quest. What’s going on, that’s what everyone says again and again. And I think readers will say the same thing if they don’t settle for easy guesses. I call this book “a unique mystery.” I believe I could present it to a theater full of Hollywood people, and almost nobody would understand what’s happening.

What is the next book that you are working on and when will it be available?

I do have another complex intellectual thriller in mind. Meanwhile I am preparing a book of poems for children.

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