A Q&A WITH BRYAN GRULEY

Briefly introduce yourself.

I’ve been a scribe since childhood, when I wrote made-up stories for my second-grade class at St. Gemma Elementary School in my native Detroit, Michigan. I indulged that compulsion in a 41-year career as a journalist for a number of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, where I shared in a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. My wife Pam and I have lived in a lot of places, now Traverse City in northern lower Michigan, not far from much of the fictional action depicted in River Deep.

What inspired you to create Attorney Devyn Payne, and how does her point of view shape River Deep?

I invented Devyn in a novel that will never be published. She was an arbitration lawyer who decided child custody cases and had to be tough to navigate the nastiness between divorcing spouses. She became a criminal defense lawyer — no less tough — in last year’s Bitterfrost, the precursor to River Deep. Many of the women I’ve written in my novels are strong, like my mother, my wife, my daughters, my sisters. In River Deep, Devyn must make difficult decisions about her mother, brother, profession, client and, ultimately, the man she loves. Readers can decide whether she makes the right choices.

How did you approach researching legal and investigative details for the book?

Watching television, of course! OK, I’m kidding (a little). As a reporter, I witnessed courtroom dramas (mostly civil rather than criminal) and read scads of legal pleadings. For both Bitterfrost and River Deep, I consulted with a few criminal defense lawyers and a couple of police investigators. I was fascinated to learn from experts and a research paper or two about how difficult it is to survive a car plunged into water. You have only a few seconds to decide what to do.

Which character in River Deep was your favourite (or trickiest) to write, and why?

My favorite would be Hooper, the one-eyed ex-cop who happens to witness the aftermath of the book’s central event — the drowning of two infant boys. I first wrote Hooper in my debut novel, Starvation Lake. He was the teenager who scored a goal against the book’s protagonist, Gus Carpenter, to win the state championship. I was delighted to bring Hooper back, about forty years later, in River Deep. He was so much fun to write, despite the sadness that enveloped him in his adulthood. He also takes us into Downriver Detroit, a scrappy, blue-collar area where I played a bit of hockey as a teen.

What’s the last book you absolutely loved reading?

I loved listening to Ken Jaworowski’s gritty, morally complex crime-fiction masterpiece, What About the Bodies, and reading John U. Bacon’s non-fiction NYT-bestselling masterpiece, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I’m about halfway through Sara Maurer’s exquisite debut novel, A Good Animal, a beautiful story told in gorgeous passages. If I tried to write phrases and sentences like Sara, I would separate a shoulder.