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"Where do you get your ideas?"
(May, 2004)

by Lisa Scottoline, author of Killer Smile

It’s the most common question people ask me, and the answer for Killer Smile is simple:

From the heart.

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The idea for my new book came to me when my father, shortly before he passed away last year, revealed to me a family secret - that my grandparents had been registered as “enemy aliens” during World War II. My grandparents had violated no law, but they were Italian-born and had to register as enemies, under presidential orders better-known for registering and interning Japanese-Americans. This obscure footnote, both personal and historical, inspired me to do the research that would begin with a helpful librarian at the Library Company of Philadelphia, an independent research library, and send me to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and finally to Fort Missoula in Montana. In the process, I learned that 600,000 Italian-Americans registered as enemy aliens and 10,000 were imprisoned in internment camps during that time.

I spun that fact of U.S. and family history into Killer Smile, which is a fast-paced thriller about murder, family, and justice, which stars lawyer Mary DiNunzio. The plot? Mary gets a terrifying telephone call while she's working late, then finds a shadow lurking at her front door. When someone close to her turns up dead, she begins to suspect that the case she's been working on - involving the suicide of an Italian-American in the internment camp at Fort Missoula - may not be ancient history after all.

That’s Killer Smile. I believe that readers will learn something from the book, get scared by it, and even laugh out loud - and ultimately, not be able to put it down.

Killer Smile is the book I was born to write.

Copyright © 2004 by Lisa Scottoline.