Author of the week: Marcia Clark

last updated 8 January 2015

Marcia Clark can’t get enough of murder, said Carol Memmott in USA Today. You might think that a woman who was at the center of the most publicized trial of the past half-century would have had her fill of killers and courtrooms by the time she got home each night. But the lead prosecutor in the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial has been addicted to crime fiction her whole life. “I’m one of those sickos who after prosecuting all day would go home and for relaxation read murder mysteries,” she says. When she co-wrote a best-selling memoir about the trial, it was natural that she’d turn next to realizing a childhood dream: becoming a novelist herself.

If only it were that easy, said Susan Carpenter in the Los Angeles Times. Clark’s newly published first novel, Guilt by Association, marks a personal triumph after years of false starts. Three earlier Clark manuscripts didn’t land a publisher, and this story appeared headed for a drawer too, until she took heed of friends who told her that its female-prosecutor protagonist was an unconvincing “cream puff.” The fix? Clark put more of herself into the character—“a lot of the bad stuff,” she says. In this novel, Clark’s sassy, headstrong heroine investigates two murders that carry only faint echoes of the Simpson case. But Clark admits that a day rarely passes when she doesn’t think about it. “I think about a lot of my old cases,” she says. “There’s so much sadness, handling those kinds of cases where loved ones were murdered. You never get away from that.”