Episode Details

What happens when the people who know a community best are also the people with the most to hide?

In this episode of Thought Atlas, I sit down with Rodney Carpentier, an author and longtime New York law-enforcement professional whose career has given him years of experience observing people during some of the most difficult moments of their lives.

Rodney has worked in law enforcement for more than 20 years, including time as an investigator handling fraud cases and later work in patrol and threat assessment. Before entering law enforcement, he studied English and had already been interested in writing for years. Eventually, his professional experiences gave him the perspective he felt he needed to begin writing seriously.

That journey became his debut novel, Our Lady of the Overlook, the first book in a planned trilogy set in the Catskill Mountains of New York.

We begin by exploring what years in law enforcement have taught Rodney about human nature. He describes seeing people respond to grief, crisis, and difficult circumstances in dramatically different ways—and explains why one of the most useful things law enforcement can sometimes do is help people understand what to expect next.

Rodney then explains how he transforms those real-world observations into fictional characters. Rather than copying people he has encountered, he combines different traits, flaws, strengths, and contradictions from different individuals to create characters who feel authentic without simply reproducing a real person.

Our conversation then moves into the world of small-town mysteries.

In Our Lady of the Overlook, a close-knit community in the Catskill Mountains has a cold-case murder buried in its history. A true-crime podcaster arrives and begins asking questions, while a rookie police officer—also an outsider to the community—becomes involved.

Rodney explains why outsiders are so useful in mystery stories. When everyone inside a community knows one another, family, loyalty, privacy, and reputation can become deeply intertwined. Sometimes it takes someone from outside to notice what the people within the community have become too accustomed to seeing.

We also explore Rodney’s connection to the Catskills. He and his wife spent years hiking throughout the region, including the Catskill 3500s, and he describes how the landscape changes dramatically across the seasons. For Rodney, the mountains aren’t simply scenery—they are an environment he knows through years of personal experience.

Then we turn to justice.

Rodney reflects on what law enforcement can and cannot control once a case moves into the wider criminal justice system. He explains why doing the best investigative work possible doesn’t always guarantee the outcome an investigator expects, and why justice can mean different things to different people.

Rodney also discusses his experience investigating fraud and working in threat assessment. He describes different factors he has encountered behind offending behavior, including opportunity, entitlement, emotion, substance use, and what he calls grievance and violent ideation.

Finally, we discuss the connection between police work and writing. Rodney explains how both require him to identify the important facts, determine where a story should begin, and turn a much larger sequence of events into something another person can understand.

At the heart of the conversation is a powerful idea: mystery stories aren’t only about discovering who committed a crime. They’re about our desire to believe that chaos can be understood and that the truth can eventually be uncovered.

But Rodney also reminds us that real life isn’t always as neat as fiction.

Sometimes there are no answers. And sometimes justice means something different to the person who was wronged.

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