River of Ruin

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

River of Ruin wouldn’t have been possible without a lot of assistance. Most important is my wife, Debbie, who let me go on a two-week cruise without her only a month after our wedding. How I pulled that off will remain a professional secret. I need to thank Captain Attilio Guerrini and his crew aboard the Dawn Princess. And in Panama, Jose Luis Fernandez and canal pilot George Allen for answering innumerable questions. What licenses I took in this novel are the result of my imagination, not their information.

I want to thank my nephew, Miguel Saunders, for letting me use his name, and my uncle Peter for teaching me how to turn a napkin into a rabbit, a trick he showed me when I was seven years old and have never forgotten. I also need to thank Doug Grad, my editor at New American Library. Not only did he know about the sewers of Paris, he’d taken his wife there. Talk about your true romantic.

The reader might be interested to know that the VGAS cannon is currently under development. If anything, I’ve toned down its capabilities because what it can really do is almost too much to believe.