When people talk to me about their favorite Davenport books, those most often mentioned are the two that featured the insane pathologist Dr. Michael Becker and the two that featured the assassin Clara Rinker.

Creating a monster is an interesting exercise for a writer. There's a tendency to become too expansive, to create an unbelievable comic-book evil genius, a guy who is planning to take over the world. That's a pretty easy thing to do — you simply pick all the bad traits you can think of (he's smart, he's bad, he smells like boiled cabbage, listens to Wagner and eats small children) and pile them up. Unfortunately, people really don't believe in Lex Luthor any more; he may amuse them on a movie screen, but he doesn't really chill them in their bones.

A key element of a horror/thriller/mystery story, in my opinion, is perceived proximity, which is a fancy way of saying that the reader must feel that the killer is nearby — behind the curtain, under the bed, in the closet, across the street. When the Grimms were collecting their fairy tales, the monsters weren't great hordes of Mongols sweeping across the European plain, but rather the witch back in the woods — just back there a little way, on the other side of that dark copse of oak — or the troll under the bridge, or the stranger passing through the village.

If you're standing around reading this new introduction, but haven't yet read the book, well, I don't want to give anything away, but at some point you may want to ask, "Sandford, where in the hell did you get that idea?"