I have always considered myself a liar. It is my profession to deceive. Not only do I tell stories about events that did not happen featuring people who do not exist, I spend all of that time trying to throw you off. I want you to think things happened one way, when I know they happened another. I want you to think that the innocent are guilty and that the guilty are innocent. I want to lie directly to your face, and I want you to thank me for it.

To your credit, you don’t make this easy on me. I’ve written over twenty books now, so I constantly have to change my game to keep you guessing. In that effort, things can never be simple. Nothing can ever be as it seems.

To be honest there are times when I question this. As much as I strive to entertain, I want to be realistic too. This can be a problem - according to Occam’s razor, the simplest answer is usually the right one. You would be hard pressed to find a single one of my plots that contains a simple answer. Sometimes it seems that to be realistic is to be simple, to be entertaining is to be complicated, and never the two shall meet.

One of my favorite parts about working with the NYPD is proving that wrong. Last week my friend, Mayor Robert Wheldon, was engulfed in a scandal as all signs pointed towards his involvement with embezzlement and murder. Credit my inner storyteller, but despite all the evidence against him I never believed he was guilty and in the end I was right. The simple answer was that since his bank accounts had been used to embezzle money, and a body had been found in his car, he was guilty. The truth was far more complicated.

This reminds me, that I’m not such a liar after all, because truth and fact are not always the same thing.; unexpected things happen all the time: and nothing is simple.