Tod sat down with Jim Ruland to discuss all things criminal…

A lot of crime novels tend to be first-person affairs. Direct action driven by direct characters. You take a more circumspect approach with multiple points of view. Can you talk about this decision and how it influenced the kind of book you wanted to write?

Well, I think if I were writing a more traditional whodunit, I wouldn’t write from multiple points of view, but in this case the choice comes from both a plot necessity — I wanted to show the ripples of a crime, in this case how the people Sal Cupertine killed in the previous book, which caused him to disappear into the guise of Rabbi David Cohen, have materialized into bigger problems outside his own view — and a thematic necessity — which is that the book is about how the government, the crime families, and religious organizations end up gnawing on different parts of the same bone. But also there’s a functional character reason: the main character isn’t doing notable things every single day. Most of the time, Sal/Rabbi David Cohen is busy doing boring rabbi things. Likewise, the former FBI agent who is hunting him — Matthew Drew — is busy trying to earn a living on most days, the gangsters who are hoping to get rid of him are also busy trying to earn a living, and, on most days, Sal’s wife Jennifer is just trying to keep her shit together enough to raise her son. That’s part of what I wanted to also show, generally, that the life of a criminal, the life of an FBI agent, and the life of someone just trying to live in the shadow of those worlds are mostly a mundane affair, punctuated by action … not action punctuated by the mundane.

No one wants to read that, however. People want to read the parts where interesting things happen. So shifting point of view and engaging a few different characters while keeping Sal/Rabbi David Cohen as the focal point became my way of telling a more complex story without long chapters where the characters just kind of sit around thinking about going to Target (though, now that I think about it, I do have scene in a Target … and another in a Walmart…).