No one disturbs our suburban slumber like Joy Fielding.

It's been 27 years since the Toronto native first upset the neighborhood with "Kiss Mommy Goodbye," the nail-biting best-seller about a single mother whose two children are abducted by her ex-husband. She followed that with 15 equally scary thrillers, including "See Jane Run," "Don't Cry Now" and her latest, "Heartstopper."

Domestic suspense has been very, very good for Fielding, who practically invented the form.

The Toronto native was writing by the time she was old enough to read. She submitted her first story at age 8 to Jack and Jill magazine and her first screenplay at the ripe old age of 12. Both were rejected, but Fielding took it in stride.

At the University of Toronto, she caught the acting bug and appeared in 20 campus productions, as well as "Winter Kept Us Warm," a classic student film.

In 1966 she took her B.A. in English lit with her to Hollywood. Though her career in film was short-lived (it included one episode of "Gunsmoke" and a Las Vegas kiss with Elvis Presley), she acquired an American sensibility during her years in Los Angeles that would serve her fiction well.

She returned to Toronto and continued to act in TV commercials while crafting her early novels. There was menace lurking in domesticity, at least in Fielding's fertile imagination. Strong, ordinary women faced with mortal danger soon became her stock in trade.

Today, Fielding and her lawyer husband divide their time between homes in Toronto and Palm Beach, Fla., where golf takes the chill out of winter. They have two grown daughters, ages 31 and 27.

Bankrate spoke with Fielding at a book conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Bankrate: We don't know of many writers who play golf. How did you get started?

Joy Fielding: I probably wouldn't be golfing if my husband hadn't bought me a set of clubs. He thought it would be something nice that we could do together, so I thought I'd give it a try. I love being outside, but I'm not sure I have the proper temperament for golf. I tend to get very frustrated and very upset.

Bankrate: You're not a club-tosser, are you?

Fielding: I have on occasion (laughs). It's less frequent than it used to be, but I would say a couple of times a year you'll see my clubs go flying.

Bankrate: You pioneered what we've come to know as the domestic suspense novel back in the early 1980s. Were there others who preceded you?

Fielding: You know, it's so funny but I don't really think there were. I never thought of myself as a pioneer in any sense, I just was writing what I liked to write, what I thought was interesting and what I thought would be fun to read. I was using my environment obviously and projecting myself into all these potentially scary situations, but I never really thought that there was nobody else doing it. It wasn't until a few years later that somebody pointed it out to me and I realized, hey, I think I was one of the first to do this.