Writer

British author James Herbert, 69, whose best-selling spine-tinglers included The Rats and The Fog, died Wednesday at his home in Sussex, in southern England. His publisher did not disclose a cause. The London-born Mr. Herbert studied graphic design, print, and photography before finding work at an advertising agency. His first novel, The Rats - which depicted London being overrun by mutant flesh-eating rodents - took 10 months to complete and was published in 1974.

HASTINGS, MICH. - A burglar expressing guilt about stealing $800 from a western Michigan store three decades ago has repaid the money, plus some interest. The anonymous thief sent a note and $1,200 in $100 bills to the Barry County sheriff's department in Hastings, and the mailing arrived this week, a local TV station reported. The writer admitted that he had broken into the Middle Mart in Thornapple Township, near Grand Rapids, about 30 years ago. In a letter packed with emotion and spelling errors, the writer asks for "help in locating a man" to whom the writer owes the money.

Welcome to the perfect lives of playwright David Lindsay-Abaire. He's the 43-year-old screenwriter of mainstream films including the current Oz The Great and Powerful and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Rabbit Hole . In recent ventures he has worked with the best of both worlds - Frances McDormand on Broadway and Nicole Kidman in film. He lives in a sprawling Victorian house in Brooklyn with his wife Christine (beautiful) and two children (delightful). He would appear to have left his hardscrabble South Boston upbringing far behind.

Pakistani security forces have arrested a suspect in the 2002 murder of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl in the port city of Karachi, according to Pakistani police and military officials. Qari Abdul Hayee, a former leader of the Sunni sectarian group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, or LeJ, was aware of the plan to kidnap Pearl, the Wall Street Journal's South Asia bureau chief, according to a military official with knowledge of the detention, who asked not to be identified. Imran Shaukat, the spokesman for police in Sindh province, confirmed Hayee's arrest during a news briefing in Karachi.

Toms River A Story of Science and Salvation By Dan Fagin Bantam. 560 pp. $28 Reviewed by Dawn Fallik   In a time when parents research the origins of their children's toys and diners ask whether their chicken is free-range, antibiotic-free, and locally bred, the chemicals in the local water and air often remain unquestioned. It's hard to read Dan Fagin's new book, Toms River , without glancing at that cup of water and wondering why we're so complacent about the most common elements in our lives.

* SCANDAL. 10 p.m. Thursdays, 6ABC. SHONDA RHIMES thinks I might be taking the rigging of a national election a bit too seriously. "Do I worry that people might turn against a fictional administration?" the creator of ABC's "Scandal" said teasingly after I asked her, during a press visit last month to the show's set at Hollywood's Sunset Gower Studios, if she was concerned that viewers might react badly to the revelation that the show's president hadn't been truly elected and that its crisis-manager heroine, Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington)

When she was 8 or 9, in the 1960s, Jen Bryant learned to type by copying obituary material on the desk of her father, a Flemington, N.J., undertaker. In 2004, having already published more than a dozen books, she happened on a painting at the Brandywine River Museum by Horace Pippin, the late African American artist from West Chester. Bookend events. From her first childhood taste of writing to her latest children's book, A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin, published by Alfred A. Knopf in January.

Tiaira Rodgers has a sweet sparrow of a voice but knows how to make herself heard in print. "I feel like some adults think, 'Oh . . . they're just kids, they don't know anything,' but that's not true," she wrote. "I'm a Philadelphian, I know what goes on here. I understand that if one person suffers, we all can suffer. If one person succeeds we all can succeed. " Mighty Writers, a grand name, is a rec center for the mind. The passage is from her "Letter to Philadelphia," a testament of hope.

Richard Collins, 98, a blacklisted screenwriter who later named names to Communist hunters during the McCarthy era, died Thursday, Feb. 14, of pneumonia in Ventura, Calif., his son, Michael, said. Mr. Collins was one of 19 writers and directors called by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 in a probe of supposed Communist subversion in Hollywood. He wasn't asked to testify, but 10 who refused to answer questions about their beliefs were jailed in what has widely been called a witch hunt.

BOSTON - For more than two decades, crime writer Patricia Cornwell has famously dramatized the life of a fictional medical examiner in her best-selling books. Now, she has her own personal drama unfolding in federal court. Cornwell, a wildly successful author through her novels about Dr. Kay Scarpetta, is suing her former financial management firm and business manager for negligence and breach of contract, claiming they cost her and her company millions in investment losses and unaccounted for revenues during their 41/2-year relationship.