This morning I drove to the post office and sent the corrected ARC of Six For Gold back to Poisoned Pen Press. The book is officially done, so far as Mary and I are concerned. It's due out in November.

The cover image and description have been on the internet, at the PPP site, Amazon and elsewhere, for quite awhile. The story is a bit different than the other Byzantine mysteries. The last two installments were dark (by our standards) and we wanted to do something lighter. I like variety, in a book series, as in anything else. I'm not sure whether readers, generally, prefer series novels to vary or to maintain a consistency in tone.

We sent our detective, John, off to rural Egypt -- a far cry from the crowded, gloomy environs of Constantinople. The city remains a major character, however, since John's friend Anatolius is left at Justinian's court to solve a murder by his own efforts. For most of the book we alternate between the two characters, locales, and story lines. We've never tried that before. Was it a good idea? I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Weirdly enough, just as I finished typing the last line, Mary (who had no inkling what I was writing) mentioned to me that a fellow PPP author was bewailing a terrible review in Publishers Weekly. Ah...yes...Publishers Weekly. Thanks for reminding me. They've given us good reviews, but there's always a first time....

No amount of good reviews seem to alleviate my dread of bad ones. Sometimes I think maybe if we were earning a million dollars a book I wouldn't care about reviews. But who am I fooling?

Well, the corrected ARC is headed back to the Press. The other ARCS are headed out to the reviewers. As always my fingers are crossed and my stomach is knotted.

At least the weather's cooler.