Before I wrote Blood on the Veld, I knew that writing a thriller about wildlife trafficking would involve a considerable amount of research. What I didn't fully appreciate was how much time I'd spend figuring out how to turn that research into a story. There are facts to investigate, places to visit, people to interview, characters to develop, and plots to untangle. Then, eventually, you have to sit down and write the thing.

Most writers will tell you they conduct this much research, arms stretched wide, to use this much information, fingers held an inch apart, in the finished book. By the time I completed Blood on the Veld, I had accumulated hundreds of pages about wildlife trafficking, poaching, conservation policy, human-animal conflict, and the economics behind it all. Most of it never appeared in the novel. But many of the stories were too interesting to leave buried in a research file. So I