For a period of time in my childhood, I fed the chickens. The job had its ups and downs. The thrill of excitement that comes with placing a tin can firmly over the chicken’s head with one hand, lifting the soft, pulsating body of feathers with the other, and finding the smooth-pebbled globe nestled in the straw …

On a mid-spring morning in 2012, a Nova Scotia father knocked on his teenage son’s bedroom door. Cole Marchand had been experiencing gastrointestinal upset for a day or two, and father Darrell was checking to see whether the mild over-the-counter remedy he’d gotten for Cole had made any difference.

Some of the most effective murders can be explained by bad luck: accidentally touching the wrong thing, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Not death by intent, not even death by ignorance; simply death by happenstance.

As a mystery writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to kill people. But I like my murder to take place offstage, without a lot of blood. So I also spend a lot of time thinking about poisons.

I also like to garden.