Finding names for characters is always a treat and a chore. For the manuscript that eventually became A Touch of Frost, I brainstormed names with my sister while driving from home to Washington, DC. We had Laura Frost and Eli Buchanan and wait! Wasn’t Eli Buchanan a bad guy in the previous book? Almost. It was Eli B-something or other. Scratch Eli. Back to the drawing board. Over hill and dale we’d look at road signs for inspiration. Cooper’s Rock. La Vale. Cumberland. Rocky Gap. No and no and no. I don’t even recall how we settled on Remington, but I remember that Phoebe Apple is the daughter of my sister’s friend (although Apple is spelled a little differently). Something about the name just always makes me smile. As for Remington, the name inspired me at different points in the story (you’ll understand when you read) to have fun with it.

The dedication is to Chloe and Jack and Mother and G and Mojo, and the Handler. Those are code names of a tight group of colleagues (mine was 006 because I definitely had a license to kill and dreamed of using it) who fought the forces of darkness in a lawsuit to protect the safety and well-being of children we care for in out-of-home placement. You don’t want to know more. Trust me. This suit occupied more than a year of my work life, made valuable brain cells wither and die, and in a public outburst that lives in infamy, refer to the Secretary of _________ as the anti-Christ. Okay, so she wasn’t in the meeting, so it wasn’t that courageous, but some of my colleagues wrote odes to me to the tune of American Pie. I was briefly the hero of my own story.