In 2020, Tracy O’Neill began to rethink her ideas of comfort and safety. Just out of a ten- year relationship and thirtysomething, she was driven by an acute awareness that the mysterious mother she’d never met might be dying somewhere in South Korea. After contacting a grizzled private investigator, O’Neill took his suggested homework to heart when he disappeared before the job was done. She picked up the trail of clues and became her own hell-bent detective. Despite Covid-19, the promise of what she might discover—the possibility that her biological mother was her kind of outlaw, whose life could inspire her own—was too tempting. Written like a mystery novel, Woman of Interest is a tale of self-discovery and fugitivity from convention that features a femme fatale of unique proportions, a former CIA opera- tive with a criminal record, and a dogged investigation of radical connections outside the nuclear family. O’Neill gorgeously bends the detective genre to her will as a writer, step