A Burial at Sea

Acknowledgments

A Burial at Sea required perhaps more research than the previous four Lenox books combined, and correspondingly there are a large number of people to thank. Chief among these is Jeremiah Dancy, naval historian at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, who patiently answered dozens of my questions, small and large, and offered me an excellent bibliography. The most useful of the books he recommended to me were The Navy in Transition by Michael Lewis and The Royal Navy: An Illustrated Social History, 1870–1982. by Captain John Wells. I also want to mention the two writers who inspired this book’s setting, C. S. Forester and the incomparable Patrick O’Brian.

As usual, the team at St. Martin’s Press, from Charlie Spicer to Yaniv Soha to Andy Martin, was wonderfully generous and helpful. So was my agent, Kate Lee.

Thank you to Dennis Popp and Linda Bock. I owe them gratitude beyond reckoning for all their loyal support and friendship in recent years, and it seems appropriate that I completed this book in their beautiful sunroom.

Emily Popp and Mary Truitt each read early drafts, and each changed the final manuscript considerably for the better with their suggestions. Thanks and love to both of them.

For the name of the Bootle, thanks to Gerald Durrell, and for the name of the Lucy, thanks to Lucy.

Because I had so much help this time around, I must insist with more than the usual vehemence that all the book’s mistakes are my own.