You describe things very vividly in the book, and sometimes it’s quite disturbing.  You have a body that is sawed in half, for example.  What do you say to those who insist that The Pawn is too graphic?
I think that when we portray evil, it should be disturbing.  Christianity, more than any other religion, believes in the reality of evil.  Other religions, like Buddhism, would say evil is an illusion.  Humanism would say that it can be overcome by hard work and education. Some religions might look at evil and say it’s real, but Christianity says, “Yeah, but so is grace.”  G.K. Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy said that Christians are more pessimistic than pessimists.  We say, “It may be bad now, but it’s going to get a whole lot worse when you get to hell.”  But Christians are also more optimistic than optimists, too [Chesterton says], because we say that infinite joy and grace and mercy and forgiveness are all possible, beginning now.  We have this strange paradox of a religion that shows us the incredible power of evil but also the incredible power of glory and grace and wonder.  So the way I look at it is, when we portray evil, it should not be muted.  It should be disturbing.  Because, if our world is just “sort of” a bad place, then we only need a “sort of” a good savior.  But if evil is as horrifying as God says, then we need a really, really good savior.

Why did you decide to present the killer’s point of view?
I make a lot of promises to the reader from the point of view of the Illusionist, so there has to be a big payoff from the reader.  It can’t be just another dead body.  It has to be something disturbing, otherwise all the previous 150 pages would have to be toned down. Suspense is the promise that something is going to go wrong.  You drop the ball if you make a promise that something is going to go wrong and there isn’t anything that goes wrong.  That was the problem with the movie The Village.  There was a huge promise but it was just people dressing up.  There has to be a payoff.

In a mystery, the reader is two steps behind the detective.  But in a suspense novel, you’re two steps ahead.  You see the killer coming into the house, walking into the kid’s room, and you’re like, “No, no, no, no!”  You know he’s there and that he’s about to do something. So that’s why I think I’ll always have the point of view of the antagonist.  I tend to step into the character’s head.  I start thinking like that.

How do you step into the head of a serial killer?  Do you have serial killer relatives?
When I asked my wife who I was most like in the story, she said the serial killer.  I’m not sure that’s a good thing!  No, I have a masters in storytelling and it’s always been natural for me to think in monologues. So it’s partly the way I’m engineered, to step into a character’s eyes.  I tell writers that you need to enter your black hole.  It’s a place we don’t normally step into, because of convention or society or whatever.  We don’t like to go there.  So I try and think, if I were this killer, what would I be thinking?  I did about a year of research.  I read lots of books on criminal profiling, geographic profiling, serial killers, criminology.  I had the world’s leading geographic profiler consulting with me.