New Vallejo Times-Herald article:

"Author of new Zodiac-inspired novel and planned TV series, holds Bay Area events"

http://www.timesheraldonline.com/articl … /170619901

By Rachel Raskin-Zrihen, Vallejo Times-Herald
POSTED: 06/15/17, 4:45 PM PDT | UPDATED: 52 SECS AGO

Meg Gardiner says she’s old enough to remember when the never-identified, so-called, Zodiac killer was terrifying Northern Californians with a murder spree that started in Vallejo.

It’s one of the reasons she wrote UNSUB, her 13th novel. CBS has already bought the rights to the book and officials there plan to create a TV series.

Vallejo is even mentioned in UNSUB — on page 309.

“That people still think, and sometimes obsess, about (the Zodiac) case all these years later is one of the things that sparked me to write this book,” she said in a phone interview Thursday.

A Stanford-educated lawyer by training, Gardiner, this month, will be promoting UNSUB in the Bay Area, a place she lived for nearly a decade, and in which she still has family, she said.

“I lived for seven years in the Bay Area and traveled all around with my college track team,” Gardiner said. “I remember thinking, every time I passed through Vallejo, that it reminded me of my home town of Goleta, in Southern California — the size, the weather, the atmosphere. I remember Vallejo as a normal, ordinary place where something horrible erupted.”

It’s that incongruous-seeming reality the 60-year-old married mother of three said she tried to convey in UNSUB, the main character of which is Caitlin Hendrix, a girl-next-door-turned-cop who’s “on the trail of an infamous serial killer when he breaks his 20-year silence and begins killing again,” material on the book says. “The detective who grew up watching her father destroy himself and his family chasing the killer, now finds herself facing the same monster — the killer her father never caught.”

Hendrix is a fictional character based on “the gutsy, relentless young women I know who wants to do the right thing,” Gardiner said.

In her research of the Zodiac case in preparation for writing UNSUB, the Oklahoma City-native, Chickasaw Nation citizen and Texas resident said she has come to believe the killer might have eluded capture because there may actually have been more than one person involved. She also believes the killer or killers were likely from Vallejo, since criminals, including serial killers, tend to operate, or at least start out, in familiar territory.

Gardiner’s law career was only a few years long, as her changing life circumstances necessitated a choice be made.

“I only practiced a few years in L.A., before I escaped,” she said. “I enjoyed it, but the time constraints and stress, with three toddlers, made it impossible to do both at the same time.”

Gardiner said she always wanted to write, and penned several trial manuscripts before finally crafting “China Lake,” her first novel, which won an Edgar Award.

“I wrote papers in school, short stories in college and law school, magazine articles, and I always wanted to write a novel,” she said. “I just knew if I didn’t write that novel I was going to kick myself forever.”

This latest of Gardiner’s works has already garnered praise from several reviewers, including the legendary Stephen King, who said, “Meg Gardiner’s novels are, simply put, the finest crime-suspense series I’ve come across in the last 20 years.”

UNSUB officially publishes June 27, and Gardiner will be appearing at two Bay Area events June 29: at 11:30 a.m. at Orinda Books, 276 Village Square in Orinda; and at 7 p.m. at San Francisco’s Bookshop West Portal, 80 West Portal Avenue.