(Guest post by Vendela Vida)

I don’t always enjoy picking out what I’m going to wear for a particular occasion, but I absolutely love picking out clothes for my characters. Characters who are uncomfortable in their outfits make me feel at home.

There’s a clothing description at the start of Christopher Bollen’s recent literary thriller, A Beautiful Crime, that I deeply admire because it highlights the discrepancy between who the protagonist, Nick Brink, is and who he’s pretending to be. These paragraphs appear in the first chapter when Nick has just arrived in Venice to execute his plan to sell counterfeit antiques to a wealthy American living in a grand palazzo.