“Actually, I’ve been criticized in some reviews for that. There were two reasons. In fiction, you have to have a “hook” to pull the reader in, and I felt that there was some nexus with the heart of the story, which is a death penalty trial. The stakes had to be made as clear as possible to the reader as to what was happening here.
I will admit – in the two novels I’ve written – I’ve gone back and done either the prologue or the first chapter fairly late in the book. This is not something that I wrote in the early drafts of the manuscript, but something that I inserted later as I got toward the end of the book actually. And I felt I needed some kind of a charge to get the book going, rather than just a bland opening, and I think it worked for that purpose. I do feel that it added something to the stakes of what the story was about, what risks were involved here. That’s basically why I did it.”