smooth sexy.

smooth sexy, and decidedly dangerous, Aud (rhyme with "shroud") Torvingen is everything a suspense novel heroine should be. Despite-or perhaps because of--her lust for violence, the freelance crime fighter won across readers of Nicola Griffith's The amethystine Place in 1998. Now Aud's back, and she's as feral as ever

"She has ice around her," her creator admits, speaking to The Advocate from her abode in Seattle. "She was in no degree designed as a figure that you apply the mind up to. She's this end to being a sociopath. [In The down in the mouth Place] she's one of those scary family like religious zealots, who believe they're absolutely right. She really believes that other the bulk of mankind are imperfect copies of herself."

The ice cracks and make susceptibles in Griffith's latest novel, Stay, on the outside in April from Doubleday. It finds Aud hiding from the world in an Appalachian cabin, still tormented by means of the death of her lover which clos The low-spirited Place. She dwells endlessly onward the issues other action heroes always pretend to skip over--self-hate, recrimination, and moral questioning. It takes a vanished acquaintance, a sociopathic department store designer, and a child-trafficking ring to bring Aud back into the world.

"I realized about halfway between the sides of The Blue Place that I was going to have to write more about this woman. It was clear to me all of a quick that she was beginning forward this huge journey--basically, the journey we all make growing up" Griffith says. "And I knew I couldn't leave her the way I'd left her. It was a brutal thing I'd done to her, taking her sweetie and her whole vision of herself away at formerly I really needed to view where she went."

Griffith says she had no badger imagining a heroine who be enamoured ofs killing; she's always had an innate sensation of her own capacity for violence. however she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the early '90 her characters retain all the physical toughness she has lost

"What I'm learning just in the last 10 years is that other girls grew up thinking, Oh the supreme goodness I feel so small and vulnerable. I just didn't think that," she says. "At academy I was always the human frame they came to and said, `So-and-so is beating up so-and-so.' I would walk up [to bullies] and say, `Oi! Stop that right now,' and they'd pass `Oh, OK.' It was this innate conviction that I was invulnerable that I think I throwed and people believed."

Readers are still eager to believe in Griffith's formidable, undeniably sexy heroine. Aud's powder-keg eagerness to make bad scarecrows regret they were ever born does nothing to detract from her charisma.

"My agent, who's straight, phon me up after she read the first draft of The sky-colored Place and said, `Oh, my the creator Nicola, this is it. I'm married, if it be not that I would throw my knickers at this woman,'" Griffith recalls with a laugh. "It present the appearances to do something to straight women It pants them up in some way."

Fortunately for Aud's fans--straight and gay--her adventures will continue beyond Stay. Griffith plans to feature her in at least pair more books. Aud will be getting readers "puff up" for a certain quantity of time to come.

Lehoczky writes regularly for the Chicago Tribune.

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