Riptide

Acknowledgments

We owe a great debt to one of Maine's finest doctors, David Preston, for invaluable help with the medical aspects of Riptide. We also wish to thank our agents, Eric Simonoff and Lynn Nesbit of Janklow & Nesbit; Matthew Snyder of Creative Artists Agency; our superb editor, Betsy Mitchell, and Maureen Egen, publisher, of Warner Books.

Lincoln Child would like to thank Denis Kelly, Bruce Swan-son, Lee Suckno, M.D., Bry Benjamin, M.D., Bonnie Mauer, Cherif Keita, the Reverend Robert M. Diachek, and Jim Cush. In particular, I wish to thank my wife, Luchie, for her support, and for her stringent (and sometimes astringent) criticism, over the past five years, of four novels-in-progress. I want to thank my parents for instilling in me, from the beginning, a profound love for sailing and salt water that continues to this day. I also wish to acknowledge the shadowy company of centuries-dead buccaneers, pirates, codemakers and codebreakers, dilettantes, and Elizabethan intelligence agents, for providing some of the more colorful archetypes and source material in Riptide's arsenal. And, lastly, I want to give a long-overdue thank-you to Tom McCormack, ex-boss and mentor, who with enthusiasm and perspicacity taught me so much about the art of writing and the craft of editing. Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit.

Douglas Preston would like to express his appreciation to John P. Wiley, Jr., senior editor of Smithsonian magazine, and to Don Moser, editor. I would like to thank my wife, Christine, for her support, and my daughter Selene, for reading the manuscript and offering excellent suggestions. I want to express my deepest gratitude to my mother, Dorothy McCann Preston, and to my father, Jerome Preston, Jr., for keeping and preserving Green Pastures Farm so that my children and grandchildren will be able to enjoy the real place that figures as one of the fictional backdrops to Riptide.

We offer our apologies to Maine purists for reconfiguring the coastline and moving islands and channels about with brazen abandon. Needless to say, Stormhaven and its inhabitants, and Thalassa and its employees, are fictitious and exist only in our imaginations. Similarly, though there may be several Ragged Islands found along the Eastern seaboard, the Ragged Island described in Riptide—along with the Hatch family that owns it—is a completely fictitious object.