MARTIN J. SMITH sees himself as the serious, big-picture thinker of the pair, and has been developing a pretentious all-black wardrobe to convey that image. He also tries to use the word "paradigm" as often as possible. As a newspaper and magazine journalist, Smith has traveled from the Philippines to Siberia in pursuit of stories, and has won more than 40 regional and national writing awards for his reporting and feature writing. A former columnist for the Orange County Register and editor in chief of Orange Coast magazine, he’s now a senior editor at the Los Angeles Times Magazine. He also isthe author of three critically acclaimed suspense novels, including Straw Men, which was a 2002 Edgar Award nominee. (For more about the novels, go to his Web site, www.martinjsmith.com.) He lives in Southern California.

In contrast, ask PATRICK J. KIGER a simple question, and you're likely to get a 10-minute serendipitous discourse that careens wildly through various seemingly unrelated topics-conspiracy theories about the  third vision of Fatima, Charles Willeford novels, the Iran-Contra Affair, lyrics to punk rock songs, 1970s pro
 basketball trivia and that puzzling thumb-across-the-lips gesture that Jean-Paul Belmondo kept doing throughout  the movie Breathless.  A compulsive researcher and autodidact, he's spent countless hours  perusing dusty library shelves and searching the Internet for answers to arcane questions. Kiger has written for GQ, George, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Philadelphia and numerous other print publications, in addition to being a regular contributor to www.discovery.com,  the web site of the Discovery Channel.  He lives outside Washington, DC. This is his first book.