PW: In Tribeca Blues , your protagonist, Terry Orr, comes to some striking realizations about people he thought he knew well. How did you come up with that scheme?

Jim Fusilli:I think one of the advantages for a writer who uses the first-person narrative is that the reader tends to believe what the narrator says. But in Terry's case, I think the reader gets the sense that there's a difference between what he sees and what he knows. I think from the earliest moments in Closing Time [Fusilli's first book featuring Terry], there's a sense that Terry's perception of his wife could not have been accurate.

PW: Is that part of a larger comment you're making on relationships in general?

JF: I think we all have a tendency to idolize those we like and to vilify those we don't. By and large, we're not rational when it comes to people we know and care about. In Terry's case, he has an awful lot of baggage that prevents him from evaluating what's going on around him.

PW: You also make some scathing comments about family. The bonds between characters not related by blood in this book seem to be deeper (and healthier) than any of those who are.

JF: For the series, you have three types of close relationships: you have blood, you have marriage, and then you have friendship. In this series, people are continually let down by blood relatives. For me as a writer, I'm exploring how Terry became the way he is. Both Terry and Bella [Terry's daughter] suffer from the same family problem. Bella has one dead parent and an inattentive living one.

PW: How did you compose Bella's character?

JF: Something that's always irked me about the classic PI stories I know and love is not knowing more about the characters' histories. So I pledged to myself that I'd let the reader know as much as possible about the characters and let them develop in a natural way, so the reader would be able to follow along, and maybe even project what may happen. With Bella, here was a happy, precocious, bright child, who suddenly lost her mother and brother, and had her father withdraw his affection and attention. She had to adapt. Most of the series' focus is on Terry and the crimes he investigates, but an ongoing story offstage is Bella's development. She's the most interesting character in the series for me. She's already changed significantly since Closing Time.

PW: The scars of 9/11 are still present in Terry's TriBeCa. How has it influenced the characters in this series?

JF: I have to answer that in two ways. When I first started going to TriBeCa 11 years ago, it was different from today. More of its blue-collar roots were visible. It was also a neighborhood in transition. That was going to be a metaphor for Terry—someone who'd come from a blue-collar background who's grown into wealth. On to the second part of the question: A Well-Known Secret was the first novel anywhere in the world to address the impact of 9/11 on its characters. I think the cloud of 9/11 hangs over the series the way it does over TriBeCa, and it's still a metaphor, since Terry's trying to recover in the way that downtown New York is trying to recover.

PW: What's touring like for you?

JF: If I had my druthers, I'd tour a lot. For someone like me who does nothing but write—I do my novels, I do a column for the Boston Globe, I write my pieces for the Wall Street Journal and NPR—I need the stimulus of getting out and talking to readers. It's really important to me to get that feedback. It's not ego-stroking; it's more constructive. I think writers are in the service of readers, particularly in genre fiction.