Since publishing The Nowhere Child, I’ve met many of you in person and received emails from readers all over the world. I have been moved, warmed and inspired by your words. I even named Bobbi Eckman’s cat after a reader’s feline companion (thanks again, Mary Anne from Texas, please give Joe a scratch for me). So, this is a little note to say thank you, and to say, keep ’em coming.

While you’re here, I thought I’d talk a little about what went into building that twist. There are some major spoilers ahead, so if you’ve skipped to the Author’s Note before reading the book, turn back now.

Juggling multiple time lines in The Nowhere Child and making sure each twist and plot-point was revealed at the exact right moment was hard work. By design, I told a simple story in a complex way. So, with The Wife and The Widow, I set out to tell a simple story in a simple way. I wanted the narrative to be clean and linear. Things did not turn out that way. You know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men, right?

Instead, I decided to build an elaborate time-jump twist into the narrative. Years ago, I was watching a particular episode of Lost in which a flashback is revealed to be a flashforward, and my mind was blown apart. I wanted to do something like that. I wanted to write something that would make the reader’s eyes bulge and send them back through the book in search of all the clues they missed. The trouble was, I had no idea how to do that.

I drove my publisher crazy by going back and forth with ideas. In one version, the dead body being investigated in Abby’s chapters turned out to be Kate (I have no idea how I would have pulled that off). In another version, Ray’s mum and John’s dad were swingers and half the book would take place in the ’70s (again, NO idea how I would have done that). Just as I was beginning to think the time-jump idea was impossible and I’d wasted months of my life trying to put together an unsolvable jigsaw puzzle, I was hit with a stroke of genius. A guiding voice from within whispered: if you want to solve this problem, you know what you have to do … ask your wife, stupid.

So, I asked my wife.