Nicholas Lea

You can be in an acting class all you want, but you don't fully learn until you get off that stage and in front of a camera.

Supporting characters add depth to a story, and great actors leave their imprint with the audience.

And I've been lucky in that I haven't had another job besides acting in the last five years.

I don't write constantly; it's two serials and a novel a year.

As the mother of a grown son with a traumatic brain injury, I couldn't be more excited about the prospect of finding out how to repair even a small part of the damage that changed his life.

Most detective story readers are an educated audience and know there are only a certain number of plots. The interest lies in what the writer does with them.