Q10 - The widespread success of John Grisham and Scott Turow, in particular, in America has made the legal thriller a big-bucks kind of book to write. Did you consider your American competition at all when writing Final Witness? Have you read Grisham and Turow? What do you think differentiates Final Witness from other legal thrillers out there on bookshelves?

A - I have enjoyed reading both these novelists and I loved the film of Presumed Innocent. There are more actual courtroom scenes in my book than in John Grisham's legal thrillers, and his fictional world is very contemporary whereas I have tried to construct a traditional rural environment in Final Witness which is attacked from the outside by killers coming from a corrupt urban world. The clashes between old and new and between town and country are an important ingredient in my novel. There's something of this in Presumed Innocent I think with Savage's beautiful East Coast home and his marriage torn apart by the consequences of his obsession with his beautiful amoral work colleague.