Gun Smith

'I'm really nervous right now, so don't make me use this, because I probably won't kill you," says Ana, the F.B.I. agent in April Smith's adrenaline-pumped debut novel, North of Montana. "I'll just maim you for life." She's not bluffing, and neither is Smith. Both women—and the book, which is due out from Knopf in September—are packing heat. Ana has a .357 magnum and Smith has 16 years in the entertainment biz, including a stint as producer of Cagney & Lacey. "In television, you learn that you have to keep the story going," she says, mindful of the understatement.

It was the early 1980s, and the idea of doing a show about women in law enforcement was still new when Smith went to New York to hang out with the detectives on the force. "The attraction stayed with me," she says. But her passion was fiction, which she'd studied at Stanford. So Smith went undercover to write North of Montana. "I didn't tell one person except my husband what the book was about. I didn't have a publisher, an agent, a deal."

Then, after three and a half years of writing, it took only a week to land an agent. The manuscript sold within 24 hours. And now the buzz rivals that of a copcar radio. "If it didn't sell," says Smith, "I'd be a slave to TV for the rest of my life." Book 'em, April.

JAN BRESLAUER