Sean O asked Ben H. Winters:

I think your "Last Policeman" books have a nice sense of place (even though I've never lived in New Hampshire.) I live in Chicago and many of the books I've read that are set there have a horrible sense of place (although "The Time Traveler's Wife" is a notable exception.) Do you do location research when setting a novel? How important to you is "getting facts right" when writing a novel?

Ben H. Winters Yes, I do a ton of research of all kinds, and it is super important to me to get the feel of the place right. When I wrote TLP I was living in Cambridge, MA, and I must have taken a dozen trips back and forth to Concord and just sort of wandered around, poking into stores and getting a sense of the city map. At some point I gave myself a tour of the hospital, which led to that really being a big location for the book. Getting the facts right is crucially important, I think, especially for books likef mine, where there is this HUGE and UNLIKELY conceit -- I want everything else to feel incredibly real, as grounded and natural as possible.

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