Goodreads Authors/Readers discussion

I'm not going to tell you how many years I spent on this book. It would make the hardest-hearted of you go for the Kleenex, and nicer people would sob openly. Why, you would ask, why spend so much time on ONE project? Not meeting your eye, I would say, "Well, it IS about World War II." Just to get into the subject of the greatest event in the history of mankind requires a tremendous amount of reading. Not just general reading such as histories, autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, or the three volumes of Churchill's War Papers (1,300 pages per), but specialized material like the canvas-bound 1920 copy of Navy Regulations I found that has a mechanism for lifting out a page and replacing it when a paragraph was revised. Then there is the question of characters. How would a junior naval officer be exposed to such historical figures as Churchill, FDR and Stalin? And how would his story unfold before the reader? My solution was to make him the politically connected stepson of a powerful senator. His story is told to an unmarried and naïve young woman who is a Smithsonian researcher in the immediate post-war years. She happens upon him at an old soldiers' home where he has fetched up like driftwood on a forgotten shore. I wanted a thriller frisson running through the narrative, so I gave him a dangerous secret. It is one that puts her in danger when she learns what it is. So all of this took time. A long time. I'm ecstatic over the early review, most of all over the ones that said they didn't want it to end.

World War II was one of history's great events, and your book sounds intriguing. Good luck!

Thank you, Ken. The reviews have been swell so far.