Emily Winslow is the author of a series of Cambridge-set crime novels and the memoir Jane Doe January. Now you can read her candid how-to-write-a-novel advice in Time to Write.

“[Winslow is] brilliant at portraying the ragged fragments of these lives. What emerges isn’t a single killer with motive and means, but a tangle of stories crossing and colliding, stray intersections of incidents and accidents, misunderstandings and misreadings, all thanks to the myopia of individual perspectives and the self-centeredness of individual desires.”

-The Washington Post