Dear Reader,

Hope this finds you and yours sheltered and well.

Three years ago I published Camino Island. Starring no lawyers, the novel is about priceless manuscripts that are stolen from a prestigious library and make their way through the black market to Bruce Cable, a bookstore owner and rare-book dealer on Camino Island, a small fictional place in Florida.

By the time I finished writing it, I knew I would go back there for another story. Featuring many of the same characters but none of the original plot, Camino Winds is a sequel of sorts—even though it in no way requires you to have read Camino Island. It begins with a hurricane, in the middle of which a writer new to the island is murdered. The killer leaves behind almost no clues, and the local police are too overwhelmed by the storm’s aftermath to investigate. It is Bruce Cable who sets out to solve the murder.

When The Firm came out many years ago, one critic gleefully dismissed it as nothing more than a “beach book.” What’s wrong with beach books? Who doesn’t like to spend a long summer afternoon by the pool or in a hammock with a page-turner, lost in another world?

With Camino Island, my goal was to write a delightfully entertaining beach book, one with no message, no issue, no cause, no great injustice to be grappled with. It worked well enough, and I was encouraged to revisit the genre and the island.

Now, with the April 28 publication near and the world staggering from a historic pandemic, I hope that Camino Winds will be a diversion, an entertainment, a way for you to get lost in another world, if only for a short while.

Stay safe out there.

All best,

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