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Laura Blumenfeld was a junior at Harvard when her father was shot and almost killed by a Palestinian terrorist in 1986. Her inspiration for this book came from a poem she wrote in which she vowed to find the gunman and avenge the attack. In the course of her research, one question haunted her: Could she make her father human in the gunman's eyes? Perhaps, she thought, but only if she hid her identity from him. He would come to know her and her father, only if he did not know who they really were. In the end Blumenfeld realized it was the very nature of the near miss that allowed her to entertain thoughts of vengeance. It was a blow she thought she could return.

Blumenfeld reported Revenge during a year-long sabbatical from The Washington Post, where she is now a writer at large. She says that journalism gave her just enough distance and legitimacy to pursue this very personal and potentially dangerous story. "Every time I walked along the edge of the gorge approaching the house where the gunman's family lived, I was dizzy with nerves. The only way I could coax myself up the steps was to tell myself, 'This is just a story.'"

She lives in the Washington, D.C., area with her husband and children.