Q. What books are on your night stand?

A. Can I first say how much I like the term “night stand”? In the U.K. we call them “bedside tables,” which is much more prosaic. 1-0 to the Americans there. All that said, on my bedside table I currently have Chris Whitaker’s “All the Colors of the Dark” and Kate Atkinson’s “Death at the Sign of the Rook.” Both brilliant, though neither will help you get to sleep.

Q. How do you organize your books?

A. Haphazardly, which is how I believe books wish to be organized.

Q. Describe your ideal reading experience.

A. I love to read on a long-haul flight, with no distractions. It has to be a proper page-turner though. A few years ago I was flying to New York and I saw in the airport bookstore that John Grisham had a new book out. This was news to me, but I was delighted. The one thing you can always guarantee with Grisham is that he’s going to keep you reading. So I settled down on the flight, gin & tonic in hand, and opened the book in a mood of great contentment. A couple of pages in I started to worry that Grisham might have lost his magic touch, and, after a couple more pages, I realized that John Grisham had actually written a children’s book. And so “Theodore Boone,” which I have no doubt went gangbusters with its intended market, was all I had to read for the next seven hours. I’m not sure I have ever forgiven him.

Q. What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

A. Don’t trust John Grisham.

Q. What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

A. I finally got around to reading “Middlemarch” this year (review — “not bad at all, an author to keep an eye on”) so my next big gap is “Great Expectations.”

Q. You take great pains to tell readers you’re not done with the Thursday Murder Club quartet. Do you already sense their anger or disappointment?

A. Writing the very first pages of the very first book, the characters became very, very real to me, and it quickly became apparent that readers felt the same. So I am always at pains to say that I can’t and won’t kill them off. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim remain immortal.

Q. What new chords were you hoping to strike in launching a new series?

A. In “We Solve Murders” I’ve added more globe-trotting thrills, as, for example, I can’t really have the members of the Thursday Murder Club firing guns at helicopters or jumping off multistory car parks. But I hope the heart of my writing feels the same — funny, warm and emotional, and keeping readers turning the pages way past bedtime.

Q. Which parts of which authors, shaken and stirred, make up your new book’s novelist-in-peril Rosie D’Antonio?

A. I love Rosie so much. The D’Antonio cocktail would be one-third Jackie Collins, one-third Lee Child, one-third Cher.

Q. What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?

A. I love books that make me laugh without taking me outside the truth of a story. I can’t think of any author that does it better than Michael Frayn (I would particularly recommend “Towards the End of the Morning”). The last book I read which danced along this line was Jonny Sweet’s “The Kellerby Code.” I would describe him as a funny Patricia Highsmith. I’m not sure there is any finer praise for an author.

Q. How do you sign books for your fans?

A. I think we worked out that I signed 46,000 copies of “The Last Devil To Die,” so I would say that I sign books with great gusto for around an hour, then with medium gusto for the next hour, finally finishing with a heady mixture of low gusto and repetitive strain injury. I do love signing books though, and I love chatting with everyone as I sign. I particularly like signing books for people with short names — say Ian, Mia or Bob. If everybody had short names then signing queues would move a lot quicker.

Q. You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

A. After a great deal of soul searching and recipe planning, I have settled on Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith and P.G. Wodehouse. I also wish I could have found a place for John Grisham, because, well, I have a bone to pick with him.