Author Michael Connelly, whose latest mystery, "9 Dragons," involves a missing person's case in Hong Kong, has written an interesting commentary for CNN on the confluence of fact and fiction. He notes that a November, 2008 research trip to Hong Kong's Chungking Mansions area coincided with a real-life mystery: the disappearance of Canadian tourist Ani Ashekian, 31.

Connelly reflects on the emotions he had encountered years ago as a crime reporter, and how writing fiction is different -- at least until a tragic coincidence such as this occurs. He writes: "I remember this from my days as a reporter -- that hollow dread and desperate hope I could read in the eyes of some of the people I interviewed -- and I thought I had left it all behind for the comfortable confines of fiction. Sometimes it doesn't work out that way. Now when I think back on my research trip to Hong Kong, I think of the young woman from Toronto who visited the same place and never returned home."

Photo by Steve Vascik via Little, Brown publishers