Long Island's Alafair Burke talks about new thriller 'Find Me'

"It’s a sprawling tale," Alafair Burke says of "Find Me," her latest thriller (Harper, $26.99). Indeed, Burke’s plot winds from Wichita and Indianapolis to Montauk and East Hampton.

Finding her way from interstates to East End fishing ports is Hope Miller. At least she says she’s Hope Miller. In her late teens, Miller survived a violent auto crash. But in the ensuing 15 years, she has been unable to remember who she was before the accident. Some say she’s a murderer. Hope’s quest to learn who she really is leads to a slippery East End real estate dealer, a sexual predator and a woman running for U.S. Senate, among many others.

In a recent phone interview, Burke, a professor of law at Hofstra and a resident of East Hampton, talked about how she wove together the many threads of "Find Me."

Do you like to center your plots on pertinent themes?

I do find if there’s something interesting going on in the culture or in the legal world that I can explore through fiction, I’ll do it, but without beating the reader over the head with it.

Do you start with your theme, then work from it?

No. It’s usually more that I have the characters first and then the plot. I don’t know if I should admit this, but sometimes I don’t figure out what the book’s about until it’s done. With this book, I’m writing about people who don’t know who they really are. And I don’t think it was until I got to the end that I realized Hope’s not the only one who doesn’t know what she’s done or where she fits into the world. People have secrets that have kept them from moving forward from the past.

How did you come up with the subject of amnesia?

I’m fascinated by memory. My college thesis was about the effects of emotion on memory. As a law professor, I write about cases involving wrongful conviction. We’re learning more and more that witness identification is a lot less reliable than you might think.

Did you do research on amnesia?

There have been some real-life cases of long-term amnesia that I find fascinating. A middle-aged man turned up in unusual circumstances with unexplained injuries. It took two detectives to find out who he was and what had happened. There was also a case in New York in which a woman had disappeared, but there were sightings of her all over the city, including at her gym. They found her in the Hudson River. Luckily. she didn’t drown. She had gone into a fugue state in which she couldn’t recall where she had been all week or what she had been doing. I put those two cases together for the book. I thought they had the ingredients of a good puzzle

Do you find that amnesia affects women more than it does men?

There is evidence that it does happen more likely in women and that women are likely to undergo trauma, such as from abuse, which may be one of the causes of amnesia. It’s almost your psyche protecting itself by voluntarily checking out, by forming this barrier.

Do you have a personal connection to the topic of amnesia?

If I did, I forgot. [laughs]

I think everybody knows that feeling when you realize that you were someplace, and you don’t remember it at all. It is kind of an eerie feeling. The reverse is also true. You could swear something happened, but you’re remembering it incorrectly. Memories are malleable. They morph over time.

What part does East Hampton play in the story?

People think of the Hamptons as a place for summer tourists and fancy parties. [That impression] is really not representative at all of the cultures out here. You’ve got [New York] city people, longtime residents, a recent influx of immigrants. There are class and race divisions. [Among them] there are these little resentments. I don’t want to beat people over the head with [this theme]. But it’s there on the page.

The fishing community and surfing communities here are fascinating and they weren’t something I knew a lot about. I had to learn about fishing. I had to ask about water patterns and where a body might wash up. I had to find places that aren’t heavily populated, where a lot of people aren’t walking around -- places that I could stick dead bodies in.