All books are something of a collaborative process, and I’d like to thank Don Winslow, Steve Hamilton, Steve Cavanagh, John McFetridge, and Shane Salerno for looking at early drafts of The Chain and lobbing intelligent suggestions my way.
My actual brilliant editor at Mulholland, Josh Kendall, pored over the manuscript with the keen eyes of a forensic diagnostician. He continually forced me to consider whether an idea or concept was as tight or compelling as it could be. At Mulholland and Little, Brown I would also like to thank the tireless and brilliant Tracy Roe, Pamela Marshall, Katharine Myers, Pamela Brown, Craig Young, Reagan Arthur and Michael Pietsch, and the entire sales team. At Orion I am indebted to Emad Akhtar, Leanne Oliver, Tom Noble, Jen Wilson, Sarah Benton, and Katie Espiner for their blood, sweat, and tears. And at Hachette Australia, special thanks to Vanessa Radnidge, Justin Ratcliffe, and Daniel Pilkington.
I want to thank the staff of the Newburyport Public Library, where I did much of the research for The Chain, and the staff of the George Bruce branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem, who provided me with a quiet space to write. Riding either coincidence or sympathetic magic, while on assignment in Prague for a magazine article on writer’s block, I wrote the final chapters of The Chain in Franz Kafka’s old office (now a hotel) at Na Poříčí 7.
To conclude these acknowledgments I’d like to express my gratitude to Seamus Heaney, Ruth Rendell, Don Winslow, Ian Rankin, Brian Evenson, Val McDermid, and Diana Gabaldon, who have given me encouragement and advice over the years and who told me to just hang in there when I often wondered if I was really cut out for this writing malarkey.
And finally, to my wife, Leah Garrett, always my first and most perceptive reader, and to my daughters, Arwynn and Sophie, for not only providing me with advice on teen mores and vernacular but for teaching me what you are capable of when your kids’ health or happiness is threatened.
Sláinte.
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