Clinging to the shore of Great Slave Lake, on the edge of the Arctic, Yellowknife is the polar opposite of my native North Carolina. It is midnight sun and aurora borealis. Moose in the pines. Snow in June. Elk chops in the hotel restaurant.

And Yellowknife’s past is as fascinating as her present. Once home to a prosperous gold-mining industry, the town’s economic derrière now rests firmly and comfortably on diamond mining.

Diamonds on the Canadian tundra? Ridiculous, you say. My reaction, too. But the tale is true. Charles Fipke is the man most responsible for the diamond boom in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. The founder of the country’s first diamond mine, Fipke has dedicated the past four decades to pursuing the precious stones.

And the citizenry of Yellowknife is well versed on Fipke and his search for bling in the raw. Many know the man personally. Some helped in his pursuit of the sparkly little buggers.

The hotel at which I stayed, the Explorer, served as Fipke’s base from time to time. His bush planes took off from a harbor visible through my window. Lying in bed, in wool socks and sweats, I’d wonder if Fipke once slept in the room I now occupied.

Equally soup-worthy were Yellowknife’s abandoned gold mines with their dark, meandering tunnels and bright yellow barrels of arsenic. It took just one subterranean visit and I was mentally penning a scene for my embryonic book.

Tomatoes. Lentils. Beans. Yellowknife. Tundra. Diamond and gold mines. I had my setting.

Add characters. Stir.

In a fiction series or TV show, the core ensemble carries through from book to book or episode to episode. On the cop front, each Temperance Brennan novel has Andrew Ryan, Luc Claudel, or Skinny Slidell. At the LSJML in Montreal or the ME Office in Charlotte, it’s Pierre LaManche or Tim Larabee. In Bones, there are Booth and the squints at the Jeffersonian. Since I interact with forensic scientists and members of law enforcement through my work, templates for these regulars are ever present in my cerebral stock.

But each story must introduce new personalities. Different good guys and bad guys to keep things lively. From whence these fresh ingredients?

Temperance Brennan is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. So am I. When I need inspiration for a fictional professor, as in Devil Bones, fodder from my fellow academics is there floating in the pot.

Now and then Tempe works with an FBI agent. Case in point, Flash and Bones. For years I traveled to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, to teach a course on the recovery of human remains. Special agent needed? Memory bytes are ready for the taking.