Do you feel as if you've learned so much from psychological thrillers that you could set up your own private practice?
There's a good reason why shrinks often star in mystery novels: They are often the book's author. Some of the most popular writers in the genre -- Jonathan Kellerman, Keith Ablow and G.H. Ephron -- took down their framed diplomas and picked up pens, and their mysteries are infused with psychological reasoning.
Why do they write? Roberta Islieb, author of the murder mystery Putt to Death, thinks that psychologists turn to mystery writing because the two fields are similar. Solving mysteries and diagnosing patients both require sleuthing, she says. Murder, the stock-in-trade of all mysteries, is the perfect amalgam of imposed morality and curiosity about the extremes of human behavior, says Abigail Padgett. Her book, Last Blue Plate Special, is a murder mystery about a prison psychiatrist and the murder of a debutante. "Nowhere are the tools for analysis of [murder] more finely honed than within the disciplines of psychology."
