“My imagination goes dark real fast even if I’m doing fun things,” Alafair Burke says.

Burke’s latest thriller, The Note (Knopf, Jan. 7), grew out of one of those fun things, a girls’ weekend she spent with two friends. They were waiting for a parking spot in a busy vacation town when another car poached the space. It irked them so much that later in the evening, after seeing the woman who had done it walking by with a man, one of Burke’s friends wrote a “kind of preachy” note and wanted to leave it on her car.

Burke had another idea. “I said, as a joke, ‘If you’re going to leave a note on her car, it should say this: “He’s cheating on you.”’”

Their laughter drew the attention of their waitress and other diners who wanted to know the story. They didn’t leave the note—but later that evening, they saw that someone else had.

“The next day,” Burke says, “I was still thinking, What if we saw it on the news that she was missing or dead or something. I just couldn’t let it go. Three girls do something stupid when they’re really drunk and a practical joke spirals out of control.” And so, The Note was born.

“You have to remember,” Burke says, “I’m the person who took the experience of meeting my husband on Match.com and turned it into a serial killer book.” (That would be Dead Connection, published in 2007.)

The Note is Burke’s 15th solo novel. She’s written two series, one about New York police detective Ellie Hatcher and the other about Portland, Oregon, prosecutor Samantha Kincaid, as well as seven standalone novels, including The Wife, The Ex, and The Better Sister. She also co-wrote six books in the Under Suspicion series, most recently It Had To Be You, with legendary mystery writer Mary Higgins Clark, who died in 2020.

Burke, 55, is crime fiction royalty herself, the daughter of iconic author James Lee Burke. She didn’t step immediately into his footsteps, first pursuing a legal career as a prosecutor in Oregon and a professor at the Hofstra Law School, a position she still holds.

As a novelist, she established early on she was no nepo baby. Her books have garnered an array of nominations and prizes as well as spots on bestseller lists, and she was the first woman of color to be elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.

The Note won’t be the only project fans can expect from her this year. The Better Sister has been made into an Amazon Prime series starring Elizabeth Banks and Jessica Biel, likely to drop this spring.

Burke recently talked with Kirkus via Zoom; the interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The main character of The Note, May Hanover, seems like your most autobiographical character: She’s a law school professor, she lives in New York, she’s biracial. [Burke’s mother, Pearl Burke, was born in China.] What made you decide to put so much of yourself into this character?

I’m always very flattered when people say, “Ellie is so much like you,” or Samantha, or Olivia, because they’re such badasses. And I’m really not—I’m just good at faking it. I’ve got a big old impostor complex to this day.

May is like that. With her big fat brain, she has managed to get into Harvard and to law school and do all those accomplished things, but she still doesn’t really feel like she’s successful. “Fake it ’til you make it,” as she says. She's really hard on herself. She’s always thinking, Did I say the right thing, is someone mad at me? Those parts of my personality are poured into May. May’s just not quite as good at hiding it as I am.

May has been friends with Lauren Berry and Kelsey Ellis for decades, but in recent years they’ve been somewhat estranged. The girls’ weekend is meant to mend fences but goes disastrously wrong. What drew you to the complex nature of their friendship?

As kids you can be really close, but then as you get older you wind up in very different places. Kelsey is the rich girl, while May is still kind of struggling; she came from very little and had to work for what she has and feels like Kelsey had everything handed to her, so there’s some resentment over that. Then May becomes a prosecutor and Lauren, who’s African American, has mixed feelings about that—her life’s work is putting people of color in prison.

They’re trying to put all that aside, but they wind up in the pot together when the police come knocking on the door, and those tensions start to amplify. They have to decide whether they’re going to stick with each other or throw each other under the bus.

May is also dealing with the aftermath of a viral video that upended her life. Where did that idea come from?

In 2020 I spent a lot of time online. Everybody knows the Karen memes and videos. Some of these people seem like truly terrible people. But some of them are clearly in the middle of having an anxiety attack or they’re in the middle of a mental health episode, and someone’s videoing them. They’re saying please stop videoing me, and the whole world is pointing at them and saying, “Ha ha.”

It's the whole idea of strangers judging you at your worst moment. So I liked the idea of someone like May—who always wants to be liked, who wants to follow the rules, do the right thing—finding herself the target of that kind of ridicule. It isn’t good for her.

Another element of the book is the impact of true crime communities on the internet. Do you share that interest? And is it related to the fact that as a child you lived in Wichita, Kansas, during the days of the serial murderer known as the BTK killer?

As somebody who spends a lot of time lurking on Web Sleuth and other true crime message boards, I can say it’s an odd kind of hobby culture.

Before the internet, there was Jim and Alafair Burke in their living room playing amateur sleuths. Most parents would protect their kids from a horrible story like BTK, but my dad would be like, “Who do you think did it?” We were like amateur profilers, and we came pretty close.

I think it was the desire to solve the case that drew me to criminal law, and I always read mysteries. For someone who likes control, the reason we like crime stories is you can be scared and confused in the middle of the book, but there is an implicit promise from the writer that the chaos will end eventually, and there might not be justice at the end but there’s going to be some kind of closure, some kind of resolution. It’s fun to be able to do that as a storyteller.

Colette Bancroft recently retired after 17 years as the book critic for the Tampa Bay Times.