I don't walk the mean streets.

You believe. You just don’t put a name to it.

She was the archetypal selfless mother: living only for her children, sheltering them from the consequences of their actions – and in the end doing them irreparable harm.

She was the archetypal selfless mother: living only for her children, sheltering them from the consequences of their actions - and in the end doing them irreparable harm.

every death diminishes us, but those that leave differences unresolved and things unsaid are the most painful of all.

The human animal only sees what it wants to see.

It's very hard to get one publisher to accept an author going over to the other author's company to collaborate.

About 10 years ago, in an effort to gain a better grasp on McCone's world, I took up the hobby of building fully electrified scale models: first of the legal cooperative where she started out, and then of her own brown-shingled cottage, a pursuit that the more tactful of my friends label unusual, and that the more blunt refer to as obsessive.

Anna Katherine Green wrote about a female inquiry agent, and there were a scattering of female investigators in the 1970s, authored by men, who just didn't ring true. So I thought, 'Well, there's an opening here for something.'

As I sat in a small room constructing what seemed to me awkward sentences and paragraphs, McCone was out having exciting adventures.