Bad News/Good News

The bad news is, I thought I was in the shade!

We had lunch on the terrace at P.F. Chang’s, on the corner of Scottsdale and Camelback, under the shade of a huge awning stretched overhead. Only, now it seems that the shade was illusory. It was some loose-weave fabric that still let the sun through. And now I have a big, red face (as well as a horse on my head - see the pic).

Grrr!

Lashings of après sun ce soir, and barrier cream every morning from now on.

The good news is, that the fourth Enzo novel, “Freeze Frame”, after receiving starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and the Library Journal, got a great review in the New York Times. You can see it here.

I got word of it, bizarrely enough, from my own study in France. My US publishers, Rob Rosenwald and Barbara Peters, have swapped houses with us - staying at our home in France, while we stay at theirs here in Arizona.

Rob called us on Skype this morning with the news (I knew it was my study, because I recognised the water stain on the ceiling). And Barbara revealed that she was 130 pages into the manuscript of my new Enzo book. What was strange about that was that she was reading it in the room where it was written! I wonder of how many books she could say that?

Stranger still... next week, she and Rob go to eat at the restaurant of France’s top chef, Michel Bras, who very kindly allowed me to spend three days in his kitchen to research my book. It is a story set in the world of French haute cuisine, and I used his kitchen as the basis for the kitchen of the murdered chef. So Barbara will have the chance to “taste” it first-hand.

She certainly won’t be disappointed by the food.

Later in the day, after getting burned at P.F. Chang’s, I went to meet readers and talk about my book at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore. A good and lively crowd turned up, and we passed an enjoyable hour, before I tackled the signing of the piles of books that awaited me.

I met, in the flesh for the first time, one of my fellow bloggers on Type M for Murder - Donis Casey. Sadly we didn’t get much time to talk, but I hope that next time we will.

Then it was off to retrieve Odin from “doggy day care” (remember Odin - he’s the wire-haired fox terrier who takes me for walks every day), before returning through the early evening heat to search for moisturisers and other soothing lotions (not to mention alcohol).

I guess I was lulled into a false sense of security. It has been cool here for the last couple of days. We even - God forbid - had some desert rain! But temperatures have soared again today, so I will cower in the shade all this week (except, of course, when Odin forces me to go out for walks).