Ridley Pearson writes thrillers with a difference – he aims to teach while providing the requisite literary chills.

"Research is great. Chasing one fact leads to another and then to another. All the time I am developing my knowledge about crime, who does it, how it happens, why it happens, that kind of thing. I like to get into all the new scientific and forensic developments."

A dozen years ago, before he transformed himself from rock guitarist and struggling script writer into best-selling suspense novelist, Pearson, 42, says that even then he enjoyed learning as he read fiction. "My model is James Clavell – especially Noble House. After reading it, you understand Hong Kong and the world of high finance – that's what I do – I want people to absorb knowledge as they read my books."

Pearson's ninth book and current entry into the thriller game is Chain of Evidence (Hyperion, 348 pages, S22.95), an extensive exploration of the possibility of a so-called crime gene, a defective gene that preordains a person to a life of violence and depravity.

The author says he was some chapters into Chain of Evidence, and the plot which involves a crime gene, when reality overtook fiction. "I've got wonderful people all over the country who send me clippings about interesting developments, and someone sent me a news story about a group scientist who believed that such a gene might exist, and that the theory was being funded for continued study."

Pearson spent 15 months working on Chain of Evidence, which he set in Hartford, Conn., because insurance fraud figures in his novel and Hartford is an insurance center. In addition, some of the action takes place in an inner city neighborhood, so rough that even city service workers refuse to go after dark.

"I was brought up in Greenwich and had visited Hartford, so I knew it a little. But I spent some time back there walking the streets, eating at restaurants, and deciding what buildings would figure in the lives of my characters. Realism is everything to me. Besides, I learn by meeting people in different parts of the country. It helps me move the story along."

In fact, nothing much that ever happens to Pearson is ever wasted. In the opening scene in Chain of Evidence, a child hides from terror in a clothes dryer. The claustrophobic heat and fright of the experience sears his life:

"He slid one leg inside the machine . . . deciding that any burn was better than what his mother had in store for him. He pulled himself into a ball, his knees tucked into a fetal position, his lungs beginning to sear from the dry metallic heat . . ."

Sound bizarre? Ridley plucked it from his memory bank. "A friend used to ride those big commercial dryers at Laundromats just for fun. That's an image I never got out of my mind. In this book, I wanted to use a little terrified kid using the dryer as a refuge from some awful terror – in this case, an alcoholic mother on the rampage."

Pearson's adult hero, Police Lt. Joe Dartelli, is haunted by such abuse, and the question is, will he be able to overcome his childhood trauma? Use a dryer as an escape hatch?

In Chain of Evidence, Dartelli investigates a string of suicides, all convicted sex offenders holding big insurance policies with altered beneficiaries.

The book also involves a fictional drug company; the magic of computer "morphing" or imaging, which replaces the police IdDentiKits used to finger suspects; the Human Genome Project, DNA and biological computers, and other high tech developments. You might think all this heavy duty science would bog the storyline, but the author is too seasoned at suspense to let that happen.

In a decade, Pearson, acknowledged workaholic, has gone from "dying to be published" to understanding the demands that come with high figure contracts. But he's found an antidote.

"My brother introduced me to recreational tree climbing – that's where you use ropes and a harness to climb huge trees. It's exhilarating. You forget your problems, because you've got to keep your mind on what you are doing."

Pearson Lives in Hailey, Idaho, and his success has allowed him to buy 400 acres in the remote Idaho mountains, where he built a yurt for the times when deadlines loom.

In fact, when he was in Denver to publicize Chain of Evidence, he went shopping for a small plane. When you are a best-selling novelist, who's just landed a big film contract, you can do things like that. Pearson has sold three books Undercurrents (1988), The Angel Maker (1993) and No Witnesses (1994) to HBO. Jamie Lee Curtis will star as police psychologist Daphne Matthews [web page note: no longer current information].

But even when he's retreating to his hideaway, Pearson appreciates speed. "It takes hours to drive there and then hike with a plane, I will go more often. It's great to get away." But never, of course, away from high-tech crime and its many permutations in today's fast and increasingly violent world.