From his Q&A with Lenny Picker at Publishers Weekly:
Who in your family gave you the idea for this novel?Visit Jeremy Finley's website.
To have my mother-in-law, who often holds conversations with sewing in her lap, casually mention that she had once worked as a secretary in an astronomy department for a professor who did alien abduction research, was a true lightning-bolt encounter. She went on to mention that she used to take bizarre messages for him, from people who believed they’d been abducted. I used her to create the character of a woman who quietly served her family, while harboring a secretive, hidden life that no one, not even her husband, was aware of.
You’ve dealt with missing persons’ cases in the course of your work. Did you draw on any actual cases for the novel?
In my career as a reporter, I have written extensively about missing people. I did not want any of the true-life cases I have researched to be reflected in a work of fiction. While I certainly have interviewed detectives repeatedly about their processes of trying to find missing people, I...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue