The Romance of the Internet

This morning a book arrived in the post, another Michael Gilbert, Body of a Girl, which I ordered through Abebooks. Once I have read this, I think I’ll have read all of his. It was sent from Green Earth books, Auburn, Washington State, not very far from Seattle. Including postage, this cost me only £4.96, less than the price of a new paperback, and it’s a nice copy too. It took two weeks to get to me. I didn’t know anything about Auburn, so I looked up it up on Wikipedia and was delighted to discover that it had originally been called Slaughter, after a Lt William Slaughter, who had died in skirmish there in the 1850s and the main hotel had been called ‘The Slaughter House.’ A great place to set a crime novel! I wonder if anyone has? Later on it was renamed and the name was taken from the first line of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village. Present Day Auburn sound like a a pleasant place, with some original Craftsman’s houses, and I liked the sound of River’s Bend, described as ‘a small residential neighborhood nestled along the Green River.’ I imagine it raining rather a lot. I don’t suppose that I’ll ever visit Auburn, but I have enjoyed this brief exploration online.
On another subject entirely, readers sometimes ask me when my next novel will be coming out. It has been a while coming, but I’m very pleased to able to say that today I signed a contract with Accent Press, a lively independent publisher based in Wales. They’ll be bringing out my new novel next year.