A Killer’s Kiss

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is my seventh Victor Carl novel, the latest in a span of stories in which Victor has moved from callow youth to something slightly less callow and slightly less youthful. Writing about Victor has been one of the great joys of my life, and I intend to keep doing it for as long as it’s legal. And yet, in order to keep our relationship fresh, Victor and I have decided to take a short break from each other. It’s nothing serious, it’s just that he’s been reading the paper in the morning instead of talking, and I occasionally have the urge to stick his head in a pasta pot. Before we get into a rut, we both thought it best to start hanging out with different people. For me, that means I’ll be writing novels with different main characters for the next few years.

So this would be a grand time to pause and thank some of those who have been in my and Victor’s corner over the years. Michael Morrison and Lisa Gallagher have been the most supportive publishers a writer could have and I am so grateful to them both. I also want to thank Jane Friedman for taking a personal interest in my work; it’s been more encouraging than she realizes. The entire publicity staff at William Morrow, including Debbie Stier, Sharyn Rosenblum, and Danielle Bartlett, have been tireless campaigners and I thank them all. Thanks also to Wendy Lee and Jennifer Civiletto for keeping me on schedule, and to my mother for maintaining her lifelong passion for the cause of correcting my grammar. Wendy Sherman, my agent, has been an advocate and a friend and I am so appreciative to her for being both. My brilliant editor, Carolyn Marino, has done more than anyone to get Victor in and out of trouble with his spirit, if not his flesh, intact. Whatever strange ideas I come up with – mysterious tattoos, insane dentists, or that most dangerous of entities, old girlfriends – she accepts it without a bat of the eye and then works tirelessly to make sure it all comes together into a Victor Carl kind of novel.

Finally, I want to thank all those who have picked up a Victor Carl book over the years and given it a try. From the feedback you’ve passed on I know you’ve laughed and cried and thrown the books against the wall, all of which suits me just fine. Writing is a strangely communal enterprise in which the reader is complicit with the writer in creating the world of the novel. Without you there would be no Victor Carl, and I’d still be answering interrogatories. Believe me when I tell you, I could not be more obliged.