Q: Your main characters in An Artful Dodge are women thieves. This is very different from your usual book. What made you decide to write this? What's its backstory? As usual, this book began with a profound surprise, a discovery that fell in my lap. My daughter Julia studied abroad at Oxford for a semester, and I met her in London afterward. It was December, and one rainy, windy night, our umbrellas in disarray, we popped into the Great Scotland Yard hotel, in Whitehall. It’s