Corleone swears the story isn't autobiographical, despite the fact he worked as a defence attorney in New York for five years, and now lives in Hawaii with his wife and children.

"Thankfully, I didn't experience the professional freefall that Kevin Corvelli, the main character in that first book, did but the culture shock he feels was all too real," Corleone says. "We've been here for almost eight years now, the differences are vast, still, but we can't imagine being anywhere else."

Corleone doesn't think he would have taken up full-time writing if he had stayed in New York. "I had my own practice, I was working morning to night, I had time for nothing else, but I would read on the commute and  all the while I was thinking about writing."

Indeed, it was reading and writing that steered Corleone towards law in the first place.

"It was the original legal thrillers like John Grisham and Steve Martini that made me want to become a lawyer so I went to law school, spent those years practising, but in the end it didn't quite live up to the expectations of these books. So after five years I decided to strike out and write one of my own."

One Man's Paradise won the 2009 Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award and Corleone has gone on to write six more books, two more in the Corvelli series and now two in the Simon Fisk series. Fisk is a former US Marshal  who specialises in tracking down abducted children, following the disappearance of his daughter a decade ago.

Years earlier, Corleone had read an article about a private investigator from Florida who specialised in retrieving children abducted by their estranged parent and taken overseas to avoid custody fights, and the idea stuck in his head.

His latest novel, Payoff, sees Fisk trying to find 15-year-old Olivia, the daughter of a Hollywood mogul. The action jets back and forth between California, the Cayman Islands and the darkest parts of South America as Fisk puts aside his own demons in his quest to find Olivia. It's a rollercoaster ride with a message that sometimes the greatest dangers are actually close to home.

The third Simon Fisk book will be out later this year and Corleone is also excited by the release of his first book in the Robert Ludlum's Paul Janson series, due soon.

"I've always been a great Ludlum fan and I've always wanted to work with the editor Mitch Hoffmann. One day I was at the supermarket with my young son and I picked up a copy of one of the Covert-One books by Jamie Freveletti and in the acknowledgements she thanked Mitch Hoffmann.

"I thought this would be perfect, writing a Ludlum book if Hoffmann was involved, so I knew it would be a long shot but I called my agent and asked her to contact him to see if there was any way we could work it.

"And as it turned out he said they'd been reading my books and I was on their list of authors who might work.

"Stuff like that doesn't happen much in the publishing industry, in my experience anyway, and I couldn't be happier."

Based on Ludlum's posthumous 2002 novel The Janson Directive, two more books in the series, The Janson Command and The Janson Option, were written by Paul Garrison.

Corleone says he's kept The Janson Equation true to the original book, recognising that there is a legacy to uphold representing the Ludlum estate. He also recognises that it's a great opportunity to  get his work seen by a new audience.

Corleone was living in New York in September 2001 when the planes struck the World Trade Centre and he says he's seen a shift in the plots of thrillers ever since.

"You don't see as many legal thrillers, or ones featuring the hard-nosed detective … There's been a real shift towards international thrillers, with ones featuring covert operations and the special forces, or ex special forces, that sort of thing.

"I think there's been a shift because maybe it's safer to read novels than it is to read the non-fiction stuff that's out there. When you're doing your research, the stuff that's out there, the stuff you now have access to, thanks to the internet and leaks, and the like. It's scary.

"You could spend your life researching this stuff for a book but a good author will say I've done enough, now it's time to tell the story."

Payoff: A Simon Fisk Novel 2, by Douglas Corleone. (Pan Macmillan, $29.99.)