“Oh, no,” said Anthony. “No, no, no.” He wanted to push the off button on the remote but his fingers wouldn’t move. On one side of the split screen appeared the cover of The Thrill of the Chase. On the other, his father, freshly shaven, wearing a tweedish jacket, giving a coy little wave to the television viewers.

Anthony sat on the uncomfortable sofa for three minutes, while he learned about Ultra Soft Charmin and fresh-squeezed orange juice and gummy vitamins for those over fifty-five.

His phone buzzed: his mother. He ignored it. He knew she was calling to tell him to turn on the TV.

Turn it off, he told himself. Turn it off, walk away. Go to the beach, look at the waves.

But of course he couldn’t, he didn’t. He sat there, and he watched as the host—Travis Weaver—announced the presence of New York Times bestselling author Leonard Puckett, and the finale of the Gabriel Shelton series. When the camera panned back, all the world could see that next to Travis on the studio sofa was Anthony’s father, one foot casually resting on the opposite knee, a little smile playing at his lips, his fingers tented together.

They shot the shit for a while, Travis and Leonard, and caught up the three people in the world who had never read a Gabriel Shelton book on who the guy was and why he was so consistently out for blood. (Gabriel Shelton was a con artist who traveled the world, conning people, sleeping with supermodels, staying in one glossy, hard-edged penthouse apartment after another, engineering successful heists, and forever eluding his nemesis, CIA agent Rex Chapman.) When they were done with that, Travis said, “Leonard, I’m sure I speak for our live audience and the folks at home as well—what everybody really wants to know is, how do you do it? How do you keep going, year after year, book after book after book?”

“I can answer that,” Anthony told Travis. “I can tell you the whole history. There he was, a mid-level corporate accountant . . .”

“There I was,” began Leonard, “a mid-level corporate accountant . . . but what I really wanted to do was write. So I wrote in the mornings, and I wrote in the evenings.”

First came A Pirate’s Penance, which sold modestly, but well enough to secure a contract for a second book. Murder by Moonlight built respectably on the audience of the first book. Then A Sea Change, which catapulted Leonard Puckett from the fringes to the core: a household name.

After sales of A Sea Change reached a million, Leonard’s publisher set up a long-term contract, and Leonard agreed to write two books a year: like clockwork, like magic, or some unknowable combination of the two. Four months to write, six weeks to revise, two weeks off in between. A pattern was established from which Leonard never wavered. Work began at nine. Lunch with Dorothy at noon, four more hours of writing, and then scotch at five, while he fiddled around with what he’d written that day. Dinner at six-thirty sharp. He averaged twenty-five hundred words a day, which meant he could complete a draft of one of his one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word books in forty-eight working days, taking the weekends off. While his editor took a red pen to that draft, he began the next one. He chugged along and along, the Energizer Bunny of the publishing house, as reliable as the tides, a man whose work habits you could set your watch by.