My revival as a writer started as I was driving down the mountainside in the Carson National Forest above Taos, New Mexico. Painting had always been a passion of mine that I had never had time to properly explore. I was on a landscape-painting trip, but I was thinking too about the mysteries I’d been reading lately. What elements went into a good one? Unconventional characters, certainly. Plots that were plausible, but not predictable, and plenty of specific locations. I was not wild about procedurals, detective stories where every iota of evidence is sifted and resifted by uniformed police as they probe its most subtle implications. I liked stories where the setting was one of the characters. The characters I liked were believable, complex, and painted in shades of gray. Evil for its own sake is a bore. The justifications and excuses people create for the bad acts they do interest me much more.

In the course of the story Zacher is drawn into a murder investigation at the request of the victim’s widow, who feels that as a painter, he might see things differently. Well, he suggests, I may see the color in shadows and the relationship of one curve to another, but whether I can see elements in a crime scene that the police might have missed is doubtful.

And so it begins. Of course Paul Zacher does see things in the case differently and ends up with a target on his back for his trouble. There is the suggestion that he might be messing with things in San Miguel that are out of his depth and best left alone. After all, there are powers that be in this town both in the expat and Mexican communities that jealously guard their position. The book that emerged from this idea is titled Twenty Centavos.

But mysteries are like peanuts, and you can rarely stop with one. My second idea was a simple one. There are four surviving Mayan books, called codices, in existence. They are all in European collections: a humiliation for the Mexican government. What if a fifth codex were to be discovered in an ancient trunk in Mexico City, among the looted belongings of an elderly woman who was being taken from her family home to a rest home. Suppose that codex contains a message that had relevance today for the Zapatistas in Chiapas. In the dust up that follows, the Mexican government, a collector with deep pockets, and the Zapatistas themselves all take positions in a deadly struggle against Paul Zacher and his partners. Naturally, the book is titled, The Fifth Codex.

In third book of this series, a disgraced former vice president of the United States retired to San Miguel and bought a suitable mansion in el centro. When he needs his portrait painted to give his backstory a little better image, it’s no surprise that Paul Zacher is asked to paint it. When the subject is murdered by having an artist’s paintbrush driven through his ear into his brain, the geometry of Paul’s Zacher’s position rapidly changes for the worse and he flees to Guanajuato with his historian girlfriend, Maya Sanchez. Not surprisingly, this third mystery in the series is titled, Brushwork.

Seven more in this series have been published, for a total of ten. The eleventh one, set in the Yucatan jungle, will be coming out shortly. It’s titled The Predator.