A reader asks: Where's Tess Monaghan?

I have been dropping hints about this since the beginning of the year, but it is a case of good news, bad news.

Bad news first. Always better to get it out of the way.

There will not be a Tess Monaghan novel in 2011 and I doubt there will be one in 2012.

Good news: Tess appears in the 2011 novel The Most Dangerous Thing. I had always planned for a PI to be part of the book and it occurred to me -- hey, I know just the PI for the job. (Thanks to Sean Chercover for helping me with this plot point, by the way.)

It is a brief, but pivotal appearance to be sure. To tell anything about it would be to give away too much. OK, I'll tell you this much: We see Tess at

-- SPOILER ALERT for anyone who has not read THE GIRL IN THE GREEN RAINCOAT --




I'm not kidding, you may not know this.




Keep scrolling.





a de facto version of "Take Your Daughter to Work" day. That is, she has a babysitting crisis and she brings her daughter to work. And that's all I'm saying.




End SPOILER ALERT.

Why no Tess novels since 2008? I'm not sure. When I wrote GREEN RAINCOAT, I thought I would expand it and make it my '09 novel, but I didn't. In giving Tess a [spoiler], I wanted to change her world radically, knowing that would mean re-inventing the series.

Re-invention is hard, it turns out. Madonna must be exhausted. And Tess's new situation is hard. I don't blame her for taking some time off.

Valerie Frankel, proprietess of the wonderful blog of that name, had kind words for GREEN RAINCOAT. Remember, she's not saying it made her sick, just that it was excellent company while she was sick.

Don't mourn Tess; she's not gone. But feel free to use the comments to tell me where she might go next. (I have always wanted to send Tess to Ireland for a book.) Fair warning: The comments may feature spoilers, so go there at your risk.