The Twelfth Department

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are a number of people who contributed to the writing of The Twelfth Department and to whom I’m very grateful.

Alistair Duncan, who worked on the BBC series The Brain: A Secret History, gave me very helpful research suggestions that pointed me in the right direction at an early stage.

Daniel Petrov managed to get me into places in Moscow I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to visit.

Johnny O’Reilly, the Moscow-based film director, who lives in the House on the Embankment, kindly showed me around his apartment and told me a story or two about the building that made its way into these pages.

Paul Richardson, publisher of the magazine Russian Life, read a late draft of The Twelfth Department and prevented me from making several embarrassing mistakes.

Barney Spender, Jackie Farrant, Ed Murray, and my wife, Joanne, were all careful and very helpful readers of early drafts of The Twelfth Department—their enthusiasm was generous and welcome.

My agent, Andrew Gordon, of David Higham Associates, always reads the earliest drafts of my novels and manages to be both an incisive and an enthusiastic critic—exactly what a writer needs. I’m very fortunate to have him looking after me, not least because he and his colleagues, particularly Tine Nielsen, Ania Corless, and Stella Giatrakou, have ensured the Korolev novels have been published in seventeen countries and counting. I’m particularly grateful to Kelley Ragland of Minotaur and Nina Salter of Editions des Deux Terres, who have been very generous in their support and encouragement.

George Lucas of Inkwell Management in New York has also been a careful reader of the Korolev novels, an enthusiastic advocate and a source of sound advice.

I knew before I began writing that having a good editor and a good publisher was important to an author—I now know just how important. I’m always aware of the many people at Mantle and Pan Macmillan who contribute to the success of the Korolev novels, in particular Katie James who handles publicity, Will Atkins who did a great copy-edit on The Twelfth Department, and the wonderful Sophie Orme who does, it seems, just about everything. However, my editor, and publisher, Maria Rejt is—well—Maria. With each novel I understand that little bit more how lucky I am to be both edited and published by her.