Everything I write tackles some kind of mystery, which means something I'd like to understand better. For my Alex Glauberman murder mysteries, the immediate question is whodunit, of course, and how will Alex find out. But what really tugs at me when I'm writing is understanding who is lying, who is telling the whole truth, or the half truth, and why. I never know the answer before I start, but I hope to by the time I'm done. My detective character is a car mechanic by trade, also a cancer patient, also a father. That makes him methodical, sometimes reckless, sometimes empathetic, sometimes careful. His attempts to understand death and life have taken him from Boston to London, Berlin, New England ski country, California, and sometimes deep into the past. Now I'm time-traveling him in the other direction, working on a new book that will bring him back to us later in his life and transplanted to Oakland, where I live now. It's like putting on a comfortable, old work glove to start taking apart a new enigma and exploring a new time and place. Stay tuned.For my history books, whether about American social movements or the city of Havana, the mystery is "what was it like and why was it like that?" For translations from Spanish, it's "what would that author have sounded like if she or he were writing in English?"For all of them, my pleasure is equally in finding out and in sharing with readers in a way that keeps them entertained.Another constant in my work is a passion for travel. I was tickled once when a reviewer praised my "evident knowledge" of locales where I'd been for a few days each. Maybe looking very closely and with an open mind makes best use of a short period of time. But a place where I've spent a lot of time as well as asking endless questions is the island of Cuba, from which we have mostly been isolated for fifty long years, an isolation perhaps now coming to an end. I've tried to bridge that gap, partly through my own observations but especially by bringing into English the Cuban voices that we almost never get to hear -- the more surprising and the less conforming to American stereotypes, the better.