Well, the short and easy answer is that I understand small towns—I’ve lived the majority of my life in them. But a small town is also an excellent backdrop for tragedy, because a death like Ronnie’s reverberates in a way that it wouldn’t in a city. You can see how her story touches all kinds of people, how it ignites the best and the worst qualities in each of them. I like setting fiction in small towns, too, because it gives me the opportunity to write about so many different ways of life. In a town of 10,000, the rich kids and the poor kids, the black kids and the white, are all going to go to the same school. Their parents are going to shop at the same grocery store.