Author Richard Price, in describing the relationship between facts and imagination in fiction, said his objective is to establish parameters of reality, within which parameters he makes stuff up. This is as good a description of writing fiction as I’ve found. While the places and police procedures in Third Person Singular are, for the most part, based on actual sites and practices, the people and institutions (particularly the Minneapolis and Edina police departments and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office) within Third Person Singular are fiction.