Q: Your books tend to feature strong female characters. Will this book be different?

A: Oh, this book is different, all right, but not because it lacks strong female characters. In this one, I think you’ll be treated to two of my personal favorites, Hannah Black and Claire André.

It won’t be spoiling anything to tell you (it’s on the jacket copy, for goodness’ sake) that Hannah is one of Theodore Roosevelt’s top spies, dispatched to Panama to observe the faltering final days of the French attempt to dig the great canal—and reconnoiter prior to a US invasion. Hannah is smart, precocious, snarky, and yet carries with her some very deep wounds. She has depths that most people overlook . . . not infrequently to their detriment.

Claire is the mistress of Henri Marquet, the Frenchman who rules the French effort with an iron fist . . . yet Claire André is so much more than the Director-General’s arm candy. She’s an ornithologist who came to Panama originally to write the definitive guide to Panama’s birds, and she is a woman graced with pluck, intelligence, and the grit of someone who has lived, loved, and lost.

Q: What about the men? Are the men scoundrels?

A: It’s not quite that binary, I hope. Men and women alike can be saints, sinners, or scoundrels—and often at the same time. People are complicated, and if my work lifts a curtain on the ‘real’ Gilded Age, it will reveal that people then, as now, had their own motives and reasons for doing whatever it is they got up to. And whether those seem to us as either good things or bad things, to them they make perfect, justifiable sense. That said, all of the tried-and-true motivators of human behavior—money, power, and sex—are on full display in The Mosquito God. Oh, there’s also plenty of curiosity, love, yearning, compassion, fear, forgiveness, envy, joy, jealousy, and revenge in this book. I think of this one as a kind of smørgåsbørd of human emotion, the entire human condition distilled into one tiny town, in one small country, in one brief moment of time—and in this little crucible my characters help to create the very-big-yet-very-small world we live in today. (By the way, I’m sure that ‘smorgasbord’ doesn’t have all those fun diacritical marks. They just make me smile.)

Q: How accurate is the historical backdrop of The Mosquito God? And how long did it take to research it?

A: While I always hasten to disclaim any aspiration to being a ‘historian’—a trained professional or academic who attempts to recreate (and sometimes interpret) past times or personages—I will proudly lay claim to the title of ‘history buff.’ If I do peddle historical fiction for a living, the ‘historical’ frame around the fiction is extremely important to me, and I don’t cut corners on trying to understand my setting and context. Furthermore—and this is critical to the way I see my job as historical novelist—I do my best to respect history by showing it as it was, not as we might wish it had been. (As an aside, even many professional historians today have too much at stake to tell it like it really was—grant money, collegial acceptance, and tenure all-too-often rest upon how well one can grind fashionable axes. I don’t give a tinker’s damn about any of that, which is one reason I didn’t pursue a career as a professional historian.)

As a result, The Mosquito God took far longer to research and write (more than eighteen months) than any of my previous outings, and waaaay longer than I expected it to do. When I dreamed up this project, I assumed that the story of the Panama Canal was so familiar and so extensively documented that it would be a walk in the park to ‘summarize’ it in time and place.

Au contraire, mon frère.

Because I never satisfy myself with secondary sources—even books like the very fine summaries by David McCullough and (even better) Matthew Parker—when I began to dig into primary sources, newspapers, letters, diplomatic correspondence, I quickly found that the ‘real’ story of the Canal was only partially understood, and that the American understanding of the story was, like all history, ‘written by the winners.’ So I dug deeper, and the deeper I went the more I had to learn to get outside my own cultural limitations.

I had to acquire a reading knowledge of Spanish so that I could view the project through Panamanian records and Panamanian eyes. Since the French made two very serious attempts (from 1881-1903) to dig the canal, I had to pore over their accounts, too. (Luckily, I have the lifelong benefit of a diploma from the Sorbonne, so that part was pure joy—affording me the opportunity to reconnect with my love of French language and history that the accumulation of years since my time in Paris had obscured but, as it turned out, not erased.)

Once I had wrestled down the human history of Panama, though, I still had to understand the natural history of the place. Namely, its terrain, climate, animals, birds, and special perils—including mosquito-borne diseases like yellow fever and malaria, and the science behind fighting them. Oh, and I learned more than I ever thought I would care to about the mosquito itself. (In a peculiar way I even came to admire the little vampires . . . though of course I still gleefully smite any that lands on me. I know what they’re after!)

Ultimately the peril was that I’d fall so in love with my subject that I couldn’t write my story. And yet therein lies another benefit of not being a professional historian—my interest in history is self-limiting, and when I know ‘enough’ I am able to step away from my little passion for history and into my much bigger one for writing. Once I was able to do that, the book came together crisply.

The point of all this is that in The Mosquito God, the history (both human and natural) was so carefully researched that it fades into the background, where it belongs.