Angelmaker

Acknowledgements

Without my wife, Clare, this book would make a great deal less sense. Her grip on story and her finely-tuned drivel detector are assets no writer should be without—but I’m not sharing. Find your own.

My agent, Patrick Walsh, is a sort of portable, personable eye of the storm. Rumour has it he trains tigers in his spare time and can bend steel with only the power of his mind. I shouldn’t be in the least surprised; with a team like that, anything’s possible.

Edward Kastenmeier at Knopf and Jason Arthur at William Heinemann practiced the dark arts of the editor upon me, deployed the Blacksmith’s Word to push me in the right direction and occasionally the Rosetta Stone to understand me. This book, or perhaps its author, required some kicking around—but the end product is the story I wanted to tell. There’s no greater pleasure than being well-edited. (Yes, all right, that’s a lie. But: aside from the obvious exceptions, there’s no greater pleasure.)

Jason Booher’s gorgeous U.S. cover designs arrived unexpectedly on a rather grim day in early 2011 and made me feel the whole thing was real and wonderful. Glenn O’Neill’s effulgent U.K. jacket was unveiled a few months later, and it’s honestly impossible to pick a winner.

John D. Sahr of the University of Washington was kind enough to advise me casually on matters relating to supercooled water and submarines. I promptly ignored the realities in the name of good storymaking. Thanks are due to John anyway, and to his legal advisor, Grape the Labrador Retriever.

Ginger & White provided tea, and a place to sit. Sometimes that’s all you need.

I grew up in a house of stories, and some of those stories were tales of crooks and criminality. Some of them were of derring-do. All of them were amazing. To everyone who sat at our table and took the time to spin a tale for a small, serious child: thank you.

My daughter, Clemency, was born during the edit, weighing approximately the same as the manuscript and considerably more demanding. Her tiny footprints are all over my life, and Angelmaker—in the case of pages 92, 307, and 513, quite literally. Thank you, little bear.