Last Thursday's midday heat was murderous -- fitting for an interview with the best-selling crime writer Alafair Burke.
The locale was the garden at Amber Waves Farm in Amagansett, and as Ms. Burke approached, a letdown: The author of 20 twisty-turny, psychologically thrilling novels, including six alongside the doyenne of suspense Mary Higgins Clark, offered no hint of someone who makes a living getting inside the minds of murderers. Hers was not a dark and fraught figure, the type of shifty-eyed, oddball character that might fuel her fiction. Quite the contrary, she was warm and smiley, a charmingly self-effacing presence, inclined to laughter.
So, where is the wellspring of her well-regarded thrillers, filled with explorations of criminal mentality and murky psychology?
"I grew up in a town -- Wichita, Kansas -- that had a serial killer," she said. The murderer called himself B.T.K. (Bind, Torture, Kill) and had already begun his grotesque spree when Ms. Burke, age 8, arrived in Wichita with her family, including her father, James Lee Burke, a prolific crime-fiction writer.
Father and daughter were "obsessed with crime," she said. "We watched crime TV shows, tried to solve the B.T.K. mystery." Wichita "was definitely a weird place to grow up. News of the serial killer was constantly on TV and they had tape recordings of him calling the police, taunting them, and he'd leave letters to the police around town. And then, he kind of just disappeared, and we became amateur sleuths at my house. So, I was always very obsessed with crime."
The obsession also fueled her reading material. Her mother, a Beijing-born painter and librarian, would take her to the local public library. "I would get a stack of books. I was so obsessed with crime that I wanted to read mysteries, and my reading level was getting beyond the kid books," Ms. Burke said. Her mother introduced her to Mary Higgins Clark. "Even though her books could be very dark, they didn't have the bad words and they didn't have sex." Decades later, when she was selected to write alongside the so-called Queen of Suspense, Ms. Burke said she had to "pinch herself."
After graduating from Reed College in Portland, Ore., with a degree in psychology, she decided to go to Stanford Law School, where she became interested in criminal procedure. She served as a prosecutor for about five years in Portland, working mostly on domestic violence cases. After that, "I followed a boy to New York," she said, laughing. The relationship ended but a longstanding career as a professor of law began. Today, she remains a tenured faculty member at Hofstra University in Hempstead, teaching criminal law and procedure.
Hardly surprising then that this crime-solving junkie of writerly pedigree (her father's cousin is Andre Dubus, and his son Andre Dubus III is the author of "House of Sand and Fog") turned her real-life fodder into fiction. In 2003, she published her debut novel, "Judgment Calls," the first installment of the Samantha Kincaid series, set in Portland and featuring an irreverent, tough-as-nails prosecutor as well as, of course, a serial killer. Her next series, consisting of five books, is set in New York City and centers a tough female detective named Ellie Hatcher.
But it is perhaps her six stand-alone thrillers, published between 2011 and 2021, in which she truly found her fictional feet. Displaying an intuitive understanding of the domestic dynamics between people, and especially their frailties, Ms. Burke was nominated for a 2017 Edgar Award for Best Novel for "The Ex," while "The Wife," published in 2018, shot to number one on The New York Times best-seller list, with author Harlan Coben declaring it "this year's 'Gone Girl,' " a reference to Gillian Flynn's 2012 smash hit. Then, in 2019, Ms. Burke's "The Better Sister" was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post.
Ms. Burke was officially on the contemporary female literary sleuthing squad, alongside the likes of Megan Abbott, Laura Lippman, and Ms. Flynn.
In her last novel, "Find Me," published in January, the protagonist, who suffers memory loss, moves to East Hampton, where Ms. Burke has lived almost full time since the pandemic. Her next novel, which she's currently working on, will also be set on the East End, she said. Any small, close-knit community like the Hamptons, which is largely unused to fearing a killer in its midst, is a perfect locale for crime fiction.
But, she added, "Apologies to the police officers out here. In crime stories, the police can't be too good at their jobs or else there's no work for the main character to do. So, the police have to be bad at their jobs. Maybe I'll have to put an apology in," she said, laughing.
Ms. Burke's thrillers are regularly touted for their authentic and compelling plot twists, which can often feel so manufactured within the genre, and characters with whom one instantly clicks. At the center of Ms. Burke's first novel in the Ellie Hatcher series, "Dead Connection," is a serial killer who uses an online dating service to locate his victims. The plot, the author once admitted, was inspired by her worst fears while on Match.com.
But, in the end, she found Sean Simpson there, whom she married in 2006. Mr. Simpson recently retired as the deputy head of security at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, and Ms. Burke's strange hybrid of fact and fiction was apparent again in "If You Were Here" (2013), a stand-alone novel featuring a lawyer-turned-writer married to the head of security at New York's Metropolitan Museum.
It's this ability to create genuinely relatable characters, allowing readers to feel concerned, worried, anxious, and scared by the ever-ratcheting tension of a well-formed plot, that makes Ms. Burke's crime fiction so addictive and enduring. Ours is a world where problems seem to have no clear answers anymore. But in Ms. Burke's books we are offered a contract: No matter how insurmountable the predicament, there will always be a satisfying solution.
"I do think of myself as a good problem solver. And a twisty plot is really just putting someone in a problem that seems unfixable and then helping them work their way through it," she said, smiling.
