Goodies General Notes and Table of Contents (read this first!)

Chapter Four

In the Tangled Web version of the book, everything takes place almost entirely on San Juan Island, so there was quite a bit more establishing information presented here. There’s more description of the hotel, and there’s a big long conversation with Reuben about Eric and Rebekah’s possible cover identities. When the manuscript was changed, and they left the island so soon, much of this stuff was removed. Sad, too, because it’s pretty good stuff.

Here it is, if you’d like to read it.

Also, photos:

Roche Harbor Lime and Cement Company

The gardens and trellis in front of the hotel

The café where they ate breakfast

Incidentally, their fake names on the island are Jennifer Sagan and Hugh Waltz. And if you think I just give people names for no reason, well, you’d generally be right. But in this situation, the names have meaning:

Jennifer comes from the fact that everyone is named Jennifer, as Rebekah says in the deleted scene. It’s the same reason that, in On Second Thought, the Jenny character is named Jenny. In that book, I was looking for something very normal to contrast the slightly more unusual names of Walt and Clara. I think, in every book I write, I’m going to put in a character named Jenny or Jennifer, and make a point that it’s a really common name. Just for fun. (Likewise, I think every one of my books mentions the Perpetual Education Fund. I throw things like this in, just to amuse myself.)

Hugh comes from Hugh Laurie, star of such TV shows as Wooster and Jeeves and House, MD. He wrote a book called The Gun Seller, which was a huge inspiration for me with both Wake Me When It’s Over and The Counterfeit. It was that book that convinced me you could write a funny book without sacrificing suspense.

Sagan and Waltz come from Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, the co-authors of the book The Spread of Nuclear Weapons. It was a book I read for my International Security class in college, and it was an invaluable resource for writing The Counterfeit.

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