The leading characters in Kim Wozencraft's adrenaline-pumping new thriller Wanted are a veteran convict and a cocksure young officer who's been framed by corrupt Texas cops.  Together, they stage a daring escape from a federal penitentiary, outrun baying bloodhounds, and hit the highway to settle old scores.

Kim Wozencraft.

Sound like your typical Hollywood buddy picture?  Not quite.  For starters, they're both women, and the highway they hit is New York State Route 209.

Gail Rubin is a political prisoner who's already served 18 years for tangential involvement in a robbery botched by the radical group Free Now.  Diane Wellman is a generation younger and a world apart...or so it would seem.  The rookie cop and the radical will find that they share far more than a prison cell.  Both have been wronged by the system, and will risk their own lives for a chance at redemption.

Stone Ridge resident Wozencraft tells their story with hard-won authority: she's been on both sides of the law herself.  Her breakout first novel Rush was based on her own experiences as a rookie Texas police officer, prematurely thrust into undercover narcotics work and convicted for perjury after denying in court that she had used drugs while working undercover.

Ex-cop, ex-con, ex-junkie, internationally best-selling author, soccer mom...it isn't your typical resumé. The last of these guises is most in evidence as Wozencraft welcomes me to the Stone Ridge farmhouse she shares with her husband, writer/producer Richard Stratton, and their three children.  Today she has traded the cowboy boots she favors in author photos for comfortable cross-trainers.  The yard is full of old rocking horses and plastic slides, boys' mountain bikes and other family detritus.  In the garden alongside the fieldstone steps lies the jawbone of some large animal - longhorn steer?  - next to a stone engraved with a Buddhist mandala.

Wozencraft is lean and athletic, with close-cropped russet hair.  Her manner is warm, but there's a hint of steel in her calm, steady gaze.  Her voice bears only the faintest trace of her Texas roots, except when she's talking about her home state.  "I'm way from Dallas," she drawls, with a laugh.  "I grew up in a landscape of superhighways connecting vast shopping malls."

In Wanted, she thrusts just-escaped Gail into similar landscapes.  "I was interested in seeing how someone who'd been locked up for 18 years would reenter the world - all the unfamiliar technologies: ATMs, cell phones."  Though the novel is a two-hander, with Diane's and Gail's stories unfolding in alternating chapters until they meet in jail, Gail was Wozencraft's entry into the story.  She has written extensively on the American criminal justice system - she and Stratton were executive editor and publisher, respectively, of the respected journal Prison Life - and Wozencraft became involved with a committee to free a high-profile political prisoner, eventually granted clemency by President Clinton.  "That was the seed of the idea," she says.  "Here was someone who'd been locked up for such a long time, and obviously did not need to be in prison anymore."

The feisty Diane seems to resemble a younger Wozencraft - Texan, a track star, a cop who butts heads with corrupt male superiors - and the author enjoyed creating her voice.  "Diane was a really fun character to do - no holds barred, right out there, a hothead.  I kept coming back to the fact that Gail had been so much like Diane in her youth.  Their lives took them in different directions, but they have similar sensibilities.  They're both vehemently opposed to injustice."

Gail has had decades to consider her role in the events that sent her to prison, and is ambivalent about her culpability.  For Diane, the wound is fresh, and unendurable: she will do anything to clear her name.  Running for their lives, the two develop a quasi-mother/daughter relationship.  Gail teaches Diane patience, and Diane rekindles the firebrand that still burns in Gail.  Wanted's two roles are so strong that it's hard to read without mentally casting the movie version (Susan Sarandon and Kirsten Dunst?  Frances McDormand and Julia Stiles?).

Rush was filmed in 1991, with Jennifer Jason Leigh as the narcotics agent and Jason Patric as her partner.  Unlike many novelists, Wozencraft was pleased with the film adaptation.  Her second and third novels, Notes From the Country Club and The Catch, were also optioned for film; Wozencraft wrote the screen adaptation of Notes, an intense meditation on domestic violence set in the psychiatric ward of a women's prison.  Though she enjoys the challenges of screenwriting, Wozencraft sees herself as more suited to fiction.  "I like having the ability to take the reader inside the character's head...For me, plot is character.  In a screenplay, plot is plot."

The Catch offers special pleasures for Hudson Valley readers, who can drive to virtually all its locations.  A drug bust unfolds in the video arcade of the Hudson Valley Mall; there are scenes in the Tongore Trading Post, Davenport's farm stand, and the taxidermy-decked bar of which Wozencraft writes: "It was said that you couldn't get directions to the Krumville Inn; you had to drive around lost in Ulster County until you were drawn to it."  But in spite of the you-are-there details, The Catch is a work of fiction.  "I don't think anyone thought it was a true story," Wozencraft says, looking startled.  "I certainly hope the police didn't."

"Basically, I took my present-day family situation - the boys were still preschoolers - and cast it back into Richard's past as a drug smuggler."  (Stratton was convicted in 1982 for conspiracy to import hashish and marijuana; a Norman Mailer protégé, he wrote the cult novel Smack Goddess in prison.) "When I was in the MFA program at Columbia, my writing professor told me how lucky I was to be writing about Texas, that there was an advantage to distance.  I suppose it was a bit risky to borrow the physicality of my everyday life [for The Catch], but this area is so beautiful.  And the domestic lives of drug smugglers, in a rural environment - that's not what you get on the six o'clock news."

Wozencraft's children have not read her books, though they're familiar with her turf as a writer.  "I've encouraged them to wait till they're 14 or 15," she says.  "They're welcome at any time, but I think they'll get more out of it when they're more mature."  Her sons are now 10 and 12; her daughter just started kindergarten.  The boys have heard their mother give phone interviews, talking candidly about her past, and they sometimes have questions.  Wozencraft tries to answer "as honestly as possible," adding, "It would be so much more damaging for them to find out otherwise.  To deny it or brush it aside or lie would be awful.  It might protect them a bit in the short term, but it would be a real violation of their trust."  She hopes their early exposure to the complexities of the prison system and its all-too-human victims "will give them a really good sense of compassion."

In the universe of Wozencraft's books, personal morality is deeply ingrained.  Outlaws are "stand-up" when they honor their commitments; authority figures are often corrupt, if not downright criminal.  Unlike the majority of crime novelists, whose uniformed heroes pursuing transgressive criminals infer a reactionary, law-and-order sensibility, Wozencraft writes from a distinctively left-wing and feminist perspective ("Two strikes against me," she deadpans).  She says there are other crime writers who share her political slant, but they don't get as much media play as more mainstream offerings.  "[People] want that taste of danger and excitement, but it's comforting to think that the good guys will come out on top.  My experience is that the good guys don't necessarily come out at all."

Wanted is the first of a two-book deal with St. Martin's Press, and Wozencraft is hard at work on its successor.  This summer, she reclaimed a primitive cabin on the edge of the 70-acre parcel that she and Stratton have pieced together over the years.  As soon as the boys leave for camp and her daughter's babysitter arrives, Wozencraft slipps her laptop and an emergency-only cell phone into a backpack and treks two miles through the woods on abandoned logging trails, writing daily from 10-3.

"I've been amazed by how much more I get done, even though I come home to a total wreck.  The hike brings a change of head, I'm really leaving the household behind.  We'll see how it works in the winter.  I have snowshoes," she says, looking dubious.  But if Kim Wozencraft sets her mind to breaking trail through a subzero blizzard to get to her desk, it seems more than likely she'll do it.  As the bumper sticker on the back of her pickup truck reads, Don't Mess With Texas Women.