Author of the week: Brad Meltzer

Brad Meltzer has fans in high places, said Kurt Anthony Krug in Reuters.com. After the release of his 2002 crime thriller The Millionaires, the author received an autograph request from George H.W. Bush. “Bush wrote me the best fan letter I ever got in my life,” Meltzer says. And the former president later became an invaluable source for Meltzer’s new novel. The Fifth Assassin follows an archivist who discovers that all the presidential assassins in history—as well as a killer who’s targeting the book’s current commander in chief—have been actors in a grander conspiracy. Meltzer used Bush to add authentic detail about life in the bubble, though that required posing a few touchy questions. “Asking a president about the hidden staircase in the White House is different,” Meltzer says, “than asking him about what it’s like to know that someone’s out there planning your death.”

Meltzer, who hosts the History Channel’s mystery series Decoded, also had help from the National Museum of Health and Medicine, said Carole Burns in The Washington Post. “They handed me a little leather square and said, ‘It’s the tattoo of Charles Guiteau, President Garfield’s assassin.’ And I realized that what I was holding was not leather: It was someone’s skin.” Such artifacts generated numerous story twists. “The nice part about writing a thriller about the four men who have killed presidents is that you don’t have to come up with the crazy,” Meltzer says. “They are so crazy on their own.”