Whiskers In The Dark

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ideally, the eighteenth- and twenty-first-century story lines should neatly tie up at the end. You, even if this is your first Mrs. Murphy mystery, know the past impacts the future. In truth, it is never past.

There is so much happening in 1787, were I to push this into 1788, this novel would be a thousand pages. Any writer producing such heft is probably too arrogant to know to need his or her editor.

There’s Sheba’s jewels, which will be resolved in the next Mrs. Murphy novel, or again this would be too long.

I am indebted to Geoff and Jan Ogden.

Also to Kathleen King and her dear friend Jack Burke.

Tracy Devine, my editor, is a true literary editor. This is not to suggest I deserve her, only to suggest we both love literature and can natter on about Shakespeare, etc.

I will do as she so politely suggests.

I will also try to make production deadlines. Lisa Feuer is head of production. There’s not a writer in the stable who does not benefit from her eye.

As for those eighteenth-century characters to whom I am tied, you may not know their private futures but you know what’s coming in the world.

Here it is a few decades and two centuries later and we all live in the shadow of the guillotine.

All the best,

Rita Mae