Interview, page 2
How true is Dead In 5 Heartbeats?
	There’s violence, murder, fights, and betrayal, but they are not true events. They’re based on the kinds of things that happen in real life. Nothing in the book really happened, and the characters are all fictitious. It’s a thriller. Let’s get that out of the way for all the cops and FBI agents who are going to read it.
How accurately is the action portrayed?
	There’s a whole lot of action in this book. In real life, most fights don’t last more than forty or fifty seconds. Maybe something goes down for a minute-and-a-half, tops. That’s how we portray some of the violence in this book. Fast and mean. In the book, for instance, there’s a shoot-out in a casino. It’s sort of funny. When someone shoots a pistol at the target range, they wear ear protectors and safety glasses. But when you’re in the middle of a real-life shooting, actual gunfire resembles more of a popping sound, kinda like balloons breaking or firecrackers.
In Dead in 5 Heartbeats, one of the main characters is an aggressive federal agent.
	Bottom line, the FBI gets away with much more than the local police. I’ve been told the FBI sends its agents to acting school, so they can be more believable in the courtroom. But quite often it works to their disadvantage when the judges or juries don’t believe them. My only question is, what’s the matter with the truth? If they sat on the stand and just told the truth, they’d be far more credible. That’s the kind of stuff I was thinking about when I created the FBI character in the book.