Official Launch Date for Book 3

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The third (and final) book of the Breach series, titled Deep Sky, will be in stores on Tuesday, December 27 of this year.

The book takes place a little over a year after the events of Ghost Country, and deals with one of Tangent's strangest secrets: a fact about the Breach that not even Paige Campbell has been aware of until now. Travis and Paige dig into this secret and quickly realize it may hold the answers to every question they've ever asked about the Breach.

Congratulations Steve Ulfelder!

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Among the many great things about publishing, there's the fact that you sometimes get an early look at a very cool novel. Case in point: Steve Ulfelder's debut, Purgatory Chasm, hitting the stands tomorrow. I think this guy is going to be around for a while.

Whoever the hell is pretending to be me, in Houston--

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--this would be a good time to stop.

I've gotten e-mails from multiple people in the past few days about a guy in Houston passing himself off as me. He apparently goes so far as to tell them the author photo inside the back covers of my books is a picture of a model. Well gee, maybe I should be flattered. I'm not.

Whoever this person is, he'd be well-advised to knock it off. If it continues, this will become a matter for law enforcement to deal with.

Excerpt

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There's a long excerpt (the first 66 pages) of Ghost Country on the HarperCollins site: Link

Wow, two blog posts in eleven months. I better slow down before my friends stage an intervention.

Ghost Country ARCs

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A couple of these showed up at my place this week. Picking up a copy of one of your books for the first time--I can't imagine that moment will ever get old. Thanks to everyone at Harper for a great cover! And thanks to Stephen Coonts for the blurb!

New York Times and USA Today Bestseller Lists

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This is the part where I wake up and I'm back in seventh grade, studying the FOIL (First, Outer, Inner, Last) method for solving polynomial equations in pre-algebra.

The Breach is #29 on the New York Times mass-market paperback extended list, and #124 on the USA Today list. I remember reading these lists all the time in the newspapers, back in the mid-90's, around the time I was getting out of high school and considering taking a crack at writing. (I ended up going with screenplays for a long time, first, but obviously I had the book bug in me from the beginning.) Someone in my family must have had a subscription to USA Today, because it was always around, and I checked out the bestseller list every Thursday. Would've been fun to know that seven or eight hundred Thursdays later, I'd be on it. (For the record, neither of these listings will appear in the print versions of their respective papers; NYT prints the top 20, and USA Today prints the top 50, while the papers' websites show the full lists--and I won't be dwelling on this distinction for much longer than it takes to write this sentence.)

So many people to thank: Janet Reid, coolest agent in the business, and everyone else at FinePrint. My editor at HarperCollins, Diana Gill, as well as Christine Maddalena, Pamela Spengler-Jaffee, Danielle Bartlett, Michael Brennan, Carl Lennertz, and probably a few hundred others I just haven't gotten to meet yet. And a special thank you to Sarah Durand. I also want to thank Lee Child again (I was lucky enough to be able to thank him in person at Bouchercon) for a cover blurb which is probably having a bigger influence on potential buyers than I can know.

Above all, everyone out there who's reading the book. In the most literal sense, I can't say it enough: THANK YOU!!!

Guest Post Today on John Scalzi's Whatever!

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The very cool John Scalzi invited me to write a Big Idea post about The Breach. His site, Whatever, is here (I doubt many people need that pointed out to them), and the direct link to the post is here. Needless to say I'm geeked! Thank you, John!