Stage Talk with Rick Koster
Where every show has something to say.
LISA SCOTTOLINE
Spending quality time with one of the world’s best — and friendliest — thriller writers
Serial bestseller Lisa Scottoline’s mind can take us to some dark places. For example, in a phone interview last week in support of her 7:30 p.m. appearance July 21 in the Garde’s Oasis Room, Lisa discussed … well, Cavalier King Charles Spaniels (three of them!), the enduring qualities of Nancy Drew, and why she doesn’t mind crying while she writes. She also shared a simple and refreshing summer spaghetti recipe.
Speaking of food, Lisa’s latest novel, This Changes Everything, starts with protagonist Julia Pritzger making an elegant meal for her family, to be served on the patio overlooking their pastoral Italian vineyard. In her estimable descriptive powers, Lisa does a splendid job of inducing intense hunger in readers — until a few pages later when, on impulse, Julia makes a Facetime call back to her native Pennsylvania and her best friend Courtney.
The catch-up conversation is disrupted when Julia experiences a powerful premonition just as Courtney enters her beloved grandmother’s farmhouse. Horrified and powerless to help, Julia watches as Courtney discovers her grandmother murdered and glimpses the killer racing out the rear of the house.
It’s a stunning hook of an opening, and the tension and excitement only intensify as Julia returns to the States to help Courtney search for the killer. The journey exposes a long-held secret, puts both woman in grave danger, complicates a situation within Julia’s own family — and deftly explores the complexities and power of Julia’s extrasensory abilities. Bonus fun: look for an appearance by Bennie Rosato, one of Lisa’s most popular characters.
This Changes Everything is the second of Lisa’s books to feature Pritzger, and her 37th overall in a catalogue that features series, standalones, historical fiction and nine humorous memoirs co-authored with her daughter, the novelist Francesca Serritella. A native of Philadelphia, Lisa was a lawyer before she tried fiction, and writing books has clearly worked out for her. She’s won an Edgar Award, is president of the Mystery Writers of America and was recently named the 2026 Thriller Master by International Thriller Writers.
Lisa has an infectious laugh and instantly comfortable way of turning an official interview into a fun and relaxed exchange.
Here are excerpts from our talk, lightly edited for clarity and space.
The Garde: The title of one of your humorous memoirs is Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog. The photo on your website shows you and a very handsome Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Is that, ah, hubby number three?
Lisa: Yep. These are the marriages that last! My advice? All you need to do is get a dog, lady. The dog in the photo is Thing Three, and I’ve had Thing One, Thing Two, and now I have a lot of dogs. I have an old cat. They’re mostly geriatric. I’m geriatric, so we get along perfectly. We’re also set for the future because we have a new puppy, too.
Garde: You live on a farm, right?
Lisa: I do. Animals are really important to me, so I have chickens. I have hens. A rooster named Bradley Chicken Cooper. And, you know, as soon as I got them, I couldn’t eat chicken anymore. They know their names and it’s very complicated. But I really think animals just give us so much. My daughter lives in New York, so my animals are my family here.
Garde: Last year, you were the focus in “By the Book,” the esteemed author interview feature in The New York Times. Is that basically the literary-recognition equivalent of scaling Mount Everest?
Lisa: Listen, I’ve been writing books for 40 years. I do a book a year, so that’s a lot, and I was very happy and gratified that the Times did that interview with me. But by the same token, and I may be weird, but I love reading all my interviews or reviews. I’m not sure many writers say that. I truly believe that every reader’s opinion counts. And now we live at an age where, online, you can read them pretty much all of them.
So, yes, it’s very cool and kind of ritzy to have, you know, gotten that Times interview. But to be honest, it means as much to me when I get emails from readers, and I answer as much as I can. I pay attention. I came from nothing and was lucky enough to build this career over so many years, and I’m grateful for it. When anyone ever says anything about me — good or bad — I pay attention.
Garde: Does that require a certain, ah, resilience?
Lisa: (laughs) Well, I do have thick skin about it, but the truth is, I write to connect with people. I want to connect with them, and I try to connect with myself whatever emotionally true is happening. Writing thrillers, you want to make a book that’s riveting, but also one that is meaningful. And so, yes, I care if people connect with it. I seek a consensus, whether it’s good or bad, and that’s helpful to me in terms of what worked and didn’t work in a particular book.
Garde: It seems as though less and less people read books anymore. Our attention spans get shorter through the constant turnover in social media. Thoughts?
Lisa: I’m as guilty as wasting time on social media as anyone else. Well, I don’t want to say “wasting.” Spending time on social media. For me, it’s a nice way to connect with readers. But also, you know, if I’m watching the Super Bowl alone in my house, I can type, “Oh my God, so and so just walked by,” and people immediately go, “Yes, yes!”
And it’s really kind of fun. I get that people want to connect. And the truth is, you know, that means they are reading all the time. They’re just not necessarily reading the long form. Social media is different. At night, if I’ve spent 20 minutes looking at Instagram, I’ve assimilated a lot of information, but I have a feeling of discontent and restlessness thinking about all the things happening in the world.
And I think we need to do a better job of telling people that reading books can be nurturing and centering and calming. You know, like, “Hey, chill! Just relax a little, everybody!” And reading helps with that. Even when I’ reading an exciting book. It’s such an immersive and transportive experience. I read really widely, and so I’m going all these places in my head, and then when I close the book, I feel calmer and sleep like a little baby.
Reading is an aspect of reading as self-care. You know, we’ve convinced ourselves that we should walk and eat right. Now we should read. I mean, I don’t want to make it like “eat your broccoli,” because the reality is that reading is like a nice warm bath.
Garde: Speaking of broccoli, the first chapter of This Changes Everything starts with our heroine making this incredible meal for her family. It’s a deceptive precursor to a sudden and jarring act of violence — and of course that jarring transition is exactly what you were going for. Fantastic.
BUT … the foodie in me was sort of angry because I wanted to sit down with the family and eat that amazing meal you described. Are you actually a good cook?
Lisa: I am an amazing cook! Well, I kind of am. I mean, I don’t do anything fancy. My mother was awesome. She made the best, we call it gravy in South Philly, but it’s the best tomato sauce on the planet. And she told me she was not going to give me the recipe because I was a lawyer. So, I don’t get the connection, but she never gave me the recipe. I watched her make it a million times, and my daughter and I still can’t reproduce it.
I really love to cook but, to be honest, I don’t know that I’m great. I have my repertoire. I think most people have their “Here’s my go to pasta” recipe, and I have things that I invent. I’ll tell you my favorite summertime recipe I invented, and it’s a simple way to make spaghetti with a really good sauce.
You just put some tomatoes in the Cuisinart with garlic and olive oil and basil, and you put the cold sauce on top of hot pasta, and it is so frigging good. I’m just telling you right now. It’s so good. I made it last night and I wish I could have it for lunch. In fact, I might have it for lunch when we hang up.
Garde: I suspect my wife and I will be trying that soon. Anyway, your latest character, Julia Pritzger, has a precognitive quality and experiences intense premonitions. Talk a little about that.
Lisa: I’m kind of known for strong women characters. But sometimes I think we downplay what we used to call female intuition. We women are very used to having a thought and then either dismissing it or not saying it or not acting on it. We sometimes edit ourselves.
And, with Julia, I really wanted to explore that notion, particularly in these times of instability. You know, a lot of institutions have let us down. Our politics are so fraught. We experience advances in AI every day. I’ll see something amazing and send it to my daughter, and she’s like, “Mom, you do not know that this is AI?”
And so, for me right now, my emotional truth is, what is real? What is perceived? And what do we perceive that we dismiss and maybe should pay attention to? So that’s where that aspect of Julia’s character comes from. I write that with the hope that my emotional truth resonates with readers.
Garde: Tell us a bit more about Julia.
Lisa: She’s an expat, but she also misses America. She’s also adopted and is trying to integrate her biological family with her adoptive family. And she is divided between choosing to be with her friend Courtney and trying to help her at the time of this horrible murder — but she also be with her husband and her daughter, who turns out are having a crisis themselves.
So Julia has a lot of stress, and (laughs) there are a lot moving parts of this. I’ll tell you, writing this, sometimes I cried over what the characters were going through. Which is fine. If I don’t cry, you’re not going to cry, right? Plus, my dogs always look up if I’m writing and I start crying. They come over when I cry. They’re really good like that. They’re like, “Oh, mom, what’s the matter, mom? Is there a treat in for me, mom? Do I get a treat at the end of this?”
Garde: You’ve often explained that you don’t write from an outline. How often do you write yourself into corners? Is that part of the fun?
Lisa: I feel like I do it every other day! I mean, it’s terrible. And I’ll think, well, I’ve gotten this far. What is going to happen next? The only consolation I have is, well, if I don’t know what’s going to happen next, the reader certainly doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, either.
And that’s OK! I don’t actually want to know. I’m one of these people who go to the movies and, like, just tell me the story. I’m not going to try to guess. I’m bad at guessing. And so, you know, people will say they like my books because of a surprise ending, and that’s because I’m always surprising myself.
Garde: Part of that, I’d think, is that, when you don’t follow a detailed plot, the characters sort of take on a life of their own and you as the writer have to follow that. Does that make sense?
Lisa: Definitely. You actually write what the characters give to you. Once you create the characters, they then create themselves by their actions. Frankly, in my opinion, just like we do, right? We live our lives and that’s who we are. You can say you’re a nice person, but if you don’t do nice things for people, or you’re unkind or don’t do anything charitable or to service others, you’re not a nice person.
So, I always look at the actions. And when characters do their actions, then I start to understand who they are. And what happens when you set them all in motion, they behave in ways that are consistent with themselves. And so often that will give you an answer to the corner you’ve written yourself into. (Laughs) I hope. You’ve got to hope. Pray a lot, too. And you got to eat a lot because eating is important. We’ve already talked about food.
Garde: I grew up fanatically reading Hardy Boys books. I was devastated when I learned that the author of the series, Franklin W. Dixon, wasn’t real! There were just a bunch of people in an office somewhere cranking out Hardy Boys titles. You are a well-known Nancy Drew fan. Were you similarly upset to learn Carolyn Keane, who wrote the Nancy Drew books, was also fake?
Lisa: First off, I didn’t even know that about the Hardy boys, and now I’m as bummed out as you were. I did not know that. I should have, I guess, because I did feel that way about Carolyn Keane. Because I had imagined her. I felt like I knew what she was like. I mean, I have a Nancy Drew collection. I love Nancy Drew! And then, to find out it was a syndicate of people!
But you know what? When I found out there was no Betty Crocker, I took that hard, too. And also (iconic online typewriting teacher) Mavis Beacon! I guess I fall for corporate symbols. I don’t know what to tell you. And don’t let me know if there’s no Colonel Sanders. I won’t be able to take it!