PEOPLE: Lisa Scottoline's best-selling thrillers are set in a world just like her own. Penelope Dening meets the former lawyer who took up writing to make ends meet
Once upon a time in Philadelphia, there was a beautiful young lawyer: blonde, blue-eyed, feisty, super-intelligent, newly married and pregnant. Like any good story, however, there were challenges to overcome before the happy ending; the discovery that "one of us wanted a baby and one didn't," being the first. The birth and the divorce, she tells me, happened simultaneously.
We're Caesar-salading at the London Ritz, and 18 years and two marriages on, Lisa Scottoline - still feisty, super-intelligent and sexy - is no longer a lawyer but the best-selling author of legal thrillers with a twist: as well as being pacey whodunits, they're laugh-out-loud funny.
"Although I loved my job, to my great surprise I found I loved being at home with my daughter more. But as I had no alimony and I was really going terribly broke, I had to figure a way of making a living out of my house, so it was either telephone sales or writing. Mercenary as it sounds, that's what was really operating, and what finally got me to do what I secretly wanted my whole life."
Life for Scottoline until then had been "South Philly", the Italian-American neighbourhood of Philadelphia, where the only book she remembers in her parents' house - apart from the Bible - was the TV Guide, and where her father would take her to the library and wait outside "like a dog". Her crazy Italian-emotional family didn't run to being intellectual, she says, but the library legacy remains, and she still reads "like a fiend". Anna Karenina is her current weighty tome.
It's a world instantly recognisable as that of Mary DiNunzio, the lead character in Lisa Scottoline's first book, Everywhere that Mary Went, and her latest: Killer Smile.
"That is pretty much my profile. I mean, I'm not really Mary, but there's a lot of her in me. I'm certainly provincial - Philadelphia just stands in for your own home town - and like me she's the insecure one. In court I was so nervous that I had blotches on my neck, so I wore turtlenecks to hide them. I tell you I looked like a nun. Or the dress-for-success look with a big bow. It was awful. But in a way you want to be nervous, because it gives you an edge. You've got the client behind you, you've got the jury in front of you and you've got to tell them a story. And, frankly, I do the same thing in the books." Just a little less nerve-wracking, though.
The story Lisa Scottoline has to tell in this, her 11th novel, stems directly from that Italian-American heritage. Two years ago, when her father was dying, he handed her two alien registration cards belonging to her grandparents, who, she learned, had been interned as enemy aliens in the second World War.
"He told me how the house had been searched, the radio taken, and even a flashlight confiscated in the belief that they could be signalling to the enemy. Believe me these people never left the kitchen. And they were ashamed of it. Yet my dad fought in the US army at the same time as his parents were enemy aliens. I told him, 'that's the next book'."
Of the 10,000 Italians who were interned in 1939, Scottoline was able to subpoena only 300 files. The rest have disappeared, if they ever existed at all. "I tried to isolate the cases where the internees died. And, you know what? They lose bodies, don't know where they died or where they are buried. It's like in Casablanca when Rick says to Ilsa, 'Let's face it, our problems don't amount to a hill of beans'. That's why, in war, you can get away with taking people who are innocent, taking away everything they own and putting them in a camp, because nobody's paying any attention, because everyone's focusing on something else that's huge.
"And when my Dad told me all this, 9/11 had just happened, so I was very aware of incursions on our own civil liberties. But at the same time I was on a book tour and on a plane every day. So, as much as I believe in those civil liberties, I wanted to strip-search people. I mean, I'm a single mother. I have to be alive. But I have been passionate about justice all my life. So I wanted to examine that whole thing, to look at what causes that kind of fear."
Home base for her stories is Rosato & Associates, an all-female law firm headed up by another Italian-American, Benedetta Rosato, who represents an alternative take on the Scottoline persona: the older, wise-cracking loner with a soft spot for men, with muscle - literally: belying her petite physique, Scottoline rides horses and rows boats.
"People who row are disciplined, so you get so much information out of the fact that Benny's a rower. After 11 books, I know that plot is character and character is plot and you cannot separate them, and so that led me to do something tougher, the examination of character over time."
The discovery of a half-sister was just one such exercise. "It turned out that my father had had an affair which none of us knew about. She'd been put up for adoption and had had a wonderful life but when her adoptive father died she came to find her family. On her birth certificate she found her father's name was Scottoline. And she said 'I know those books,' and just came knocking at the door. And she was exactly like me. At first it was a little strange but we are very close now.
"So, having lived it, I can write about it. In Mistaken Identity I made her into an evil twin - because no one wants to read about a good twin, that's boring. And she loved it. And also - like I said to her - you take the risk when you come to find your sister and she's a writer. I'm going to take notes, OK?
"As I got to know her better, I said, 'What if you had had a lousy life? And you came to find me and I had an apparently good life?' Because I know the fortuity of all this. She was born on that side of the marriage and went that way. I was born on this side of the marriage and went this way. It's purely fluke."
That scenario became Dead Ringer, the 10th of the series, this time starring head honchette, Benny Rosato.
Lisa Scottoline is regularly compared to thriller heavyweights John Grisham and Scott Turow yet, in many respects, her heroines - civil, not criminal, lawyers - could be said to owe more to Nancy Drew and Miss Marple. They are amateur sleuths who, like their creator, face the slick world of men armed with lipstick and Manolo Blahnik heels, with their heart in the right place, whose happy endings are not to make fortunes or (ruefully) even to find Mr Right, but simply to survive with family and friends intact.
• Killer Smile by Lisa Scottoline is published by Macmillan at £12.99 in the UK