It took a while getting here by car from Los Angeles. One of the highlights - and I highly recommend it - is the espresso at Bella's Espresso Bar and Diner in Wells, Nevada. Bella is the only woman owner of a legal brothel in Nevada - and she also has this great diner where they pull one of the very finest espressos on the planet. I recommend it highly.
Now what, if anything, that has to do with being here at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop is beyond me. Other than that without those two double espressos at Bella's I probably would have been slaughtered on the highway between there and here.
And here is a very good place where they are most kind about putting up with the odd music I usually bring along to play with my books. In this case some quirky Indonesian music - what could possibly be better than an all-woman heavy metal gamelan band from Jakarta doing a song about teenage girls hanging out in shopping malls hoping to get laid? It's not the sort of thing you hear in most bookstores and I've got to really hand it to these guys for permitting me to subject their customers to it.
The new book is FLIGHT OF THE HORNBILL and is loosely based on the true story of what is in some ways Canada's Enron - Bre-X, responsible for the world's largest gold fraud. There's violence, sex, helicopters, birds, snakes, strange Indonesian locales, nearly everything you could possibly want in a book.
Until the next one comes out next June - SHANGHAIED - opening in Hong Kong during the handover ceremony back to China (a secret, a real one, is revealed) and finding its way to Shanghai where all hell breaks loose. As it will.
But, now Bill, my erstwhile traveling companion and fellow Bleak House author (we also share an agent - we each get half of her - that is if you don't count her other clients) and I are going to have to hit the road to Portland where we will next do our best to defile books with our juvenile scrawl. Really, you ought to show up and let us do that for you.
I forgot about the multiple personalities - that's us, all eight or nine of us - we have recently been informed that one of our personalities is apparently our publicist. We will have to abuse him/her on the drive south.
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