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IT was summer and I was getting ready for a three-day weekend at the shore. Looking around my office for something to read, I picked up a manuscript that had come in earlier that week from one of my authors: Pickling for Profit and Pleasure. It was clear a title change would be in order, but that aside it just didn’t strike me as beach material. I debated between two other manuscripts—a book by a country veterinarian called Just a Little Hoarse and What to Do about It and a seven-hundred-page first novel entitled Ah, Life!

Thoroughly discouraged, I told myself I’d pick up a couple of Agatha Christie mysteries at the train station. But then there came a scratching at the door and my weekend reading dilemma was solved.

For there on the other side stood my old friend and valued author, Harold X., an enticing manila

envelope gripped between his teeth. Gently, he laid it into my hands and before I could so much as ask if he’d join me for a bowl of cappuccino at the trendy little cafe that had just opened across the street, he was gone.

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