Lisa Scottoline: 'Justice Is a
Consolation Prize'

In Lisa Scottoline’s latest thriller, Someone Knows, a planned development in an orderly, just-about-idyllic Pennsylvania suburb is the emotional epicenter of a crime that resonates out across the years, even though almost nobody knows it happened. There’s a group of teenagers, a gun found buried in the woods, and a dangerous game gone disastrously wrong. It’s a typically powerful scenario for an author who has conquered nearly every corner of the thriller world, and it gives Scottoline a poignant perspective to examine what happens when crimes and traumas are kept secret. The tension is incredible, the characters vivid, and the story masterfully told, adding up to one of the author’s best standalone novels yet.

Scottoline is perhaps best known for her long-running, bestselling legal thrillers featuring the women of Rosato & Associates. But in psychological thrillers like Someone Knows, she’s proving herself yet again to be one of the suspense world’s most talented, dynamic practitioners. I caught up with her as the new book was released to discuss suburban living, the dangers of teenage years, and why the “justice” our society hands out is never quite enough.

Dwyer Murphy: You start this novel with a powerful idea: “when teenagers get together, something dark can take over…Whatever you call it, it will make you do the worst thing you ever did in your life. And in your darkest moments, you will wonder if it made you do it, or simply allowed you to.” Do you suspect that’s a nearly universal truth—that all of us are haunted by some dark act we did, or might have done, in those teenage years? Those lines made me shudder.

Lisa Scottoline: I do think that a lot of us have things in our past that we are not particularly proud of. It doesn’t have to be illegality, or certainly not rise to the level that it does in this novel, but we make mistakes because we’re human beings, and young people make more mistakes than others. I’m divorced twice for a reason. And I think that when we make a mistake, it’s incumbent upon us to explore what motivated us to make the decision we did. Bad decisions are so much more interesting than good ones. That’s the core of this novel.

And by the way, I’ve never written a prologue like this, which is such a fairly direct addressing of the reader. But I want the reader to think a little about the relationship of fiction to their own behavior, and that’s also a subtext in this book, since one of the characters loves books and is a major reader. Since I am such a book lover and have been my whole life, and obviously since I’m writing every day, I really do like to think about how what we read affects what we do. There’s simply no greater purpose to reading, and that’s why the first page exists in this novel.

In a way, your book is upending a traditional thriller formula. Rather than trying to catch someone, your characters are dealing with the ramifications—moral and psychological weight—of not being caught. How did that setup arrive?

Thank you so much! This novel is darker than my others, and I really wanted to explore this deep question. All my books explore the nature of crime as it relates to justice, and we generally say that justice is done once someone gets punished. In my experience as a lawyer, and writing about law and justice, I have long thought that justice is a consolation prize, because what people really want is everything back the way it was. And my research yields this too, because when I talk to victims of crime or their families, justice is what they’ll settle for, but what they really want is the status quo ante. So this novel takes exploration a step further, because it answers the question, how do you get justice when there is no punishment? And that is Allie’s problem in this novel. I really liked her because I think she is a legitimately guilt ridden person, but the question she asks her hard ones, and I hope she gets the answers.

The setting in this book is subtly important: a planned development in Pennsylvania. It’s the epitome of suburbia. Was there something specific about that landscape or lifestyle that you were looking to explore with this story?

I love to write about the relationships in families and all of those interesting family dynamics that we all experience and hopefully, examine in our own lives, from time to time. Setting is always important in my novels, and you’re right to just zero in on the development, and I just love the resonance of the setting with the themes in this novel. For example, take the word “development.” We use it all the time, but when you think about it with relationship to character, you instantly think about how characters develop, and the crux of this novel is how this terrible prank-gone-wrong disrupts and warps the development of these individuals. I also love that developments do create community, which is a wonderful thing, and you see in this book that in effect the developments around the town have rendered the town obsolete. I think that’s a really interesting notion to explore, and as part of the backdrop of this book too.

Of the many terrible deaths we can concoct for people, Russian roulette seems to have a particularly haunting effect. In this story, you make clear that there’s something different about this kind of senseless death, something that distinguishes it from all others. What is it about that ‘game’ that has such a hold on our imaginations and has such a profoundly unsettling effect?

I absolutely agree with you, and Russian roulette is so weird. And it has always sort of haunted me, ever since the movie The Deer Hunter, and I wanted to do the research. It is incredible how many cops and mental health professionals reference that movie. And also when you do the research, you find that there are a lot of teenagers who play Russian roulette, just like the circumstances. It’s heartbreaking and tragic, but when you really parse it, putting on my lawyer hat here, you realize extremely reckless behavior like that happens every day with drunk driving, and so it’s clear that people do it, even though it is horrifying, not only to the perpetrators, but to society in general. The dark side in a suburban everyman is irresistible to me.

You’re prolific in so many areas right now—writing standalone thrillers, the Rosato & Associate / DiNunzio series, as well as your nonfiction humor books. Do you take a different approach when coming to the domestic thrillers? I imagine these books take a special intensity of concentration, but then again maybe all writing does.

You’re absolutely right, in that all writing takes unbelievable concentration. I feel so very lucky to have readers that will be loyal to me and follow me as I try to explore different types of writing, as I think it makes me a better writer and it certainly makes me a happier one. I just started writing these domestic thrillers 10 years ago, and it’s really been fascinating to me, and I’m about to embark on historical fiction. A good writer can write anything, and that’s what I tell myself when I get nervous. But my approach is no different based on the type of novel. Writing is a lot of anxiety, endless hours at the desk, and 2,000 words a day, without exception. And frankly, that’s good news. I love my job and I really would encourage anybody reading this to try their hand at it. It’s just telling yourself a story and writing it down. My mantra is “get it down, then get it good.” And that’s my rule, no matter what I write.