Thanks are due to: my excellent editor Laura Palmer, PR guru Helen Richardson and the brilliantly talented team at Head of Zeus, including its founder Anthony Cheetham, sales, marketing, production and the fab art department. Thanks also to: Patrick Walsh, my agent, and his colleague John Ash at Pew Literary; the insightful and generous Martin Fletcher; Tim ‘Hawk-eye’ Pedley; Gemma Wain; and Jenni Davis.
Experts, advisors and facilitators regarding weaponry, combat and killing, soldiery, AI, computing, poker, forensics, engineering and the like include: the generous and brilliant thriller writer Zoë Sharp, author of the Charlie Fox thrillers which I cannot recommend highly enough; Derick Hatton, late PARA; DCI (Ret’d) Andy Mortimer, of the Metropolitan Police; Matt Pedley, formerly of the Armed Response Unit, Metropolitan Police; and Alan Tribe, Operational Forensics Manager with the Met Police. Richard Sargeant of Faculty; Stephen Bevan of Media Foresight; and Dr Noura Al-Moubayed of the Computer Science Department at Durham University. Helen Le Fevre; Dr Will Elliott and Dr Stephanie Greenwell FRCA; Philip McGill and Dr Eamon McCrory of UCL; Eric Pinkerton and Major General (Ret’d) Craig Lawrence CBE, late The Royal Gurkha Rifles; Simon Young of Magic Word Media; WO2 (QMSI) (Ret’d) Terry Jones, late SASC; Paul Williams, Royal College of Defence Studies; as well as Allison and Ian Joynson. Also, Sue Brooks and Andrew Macdonald; David Paul and Clare Grant; Helen Chappell; Angela Barnes; Abigail Bosanko; Sophie Atkinson; and Andy Tennant. All errors and indeed misinterpretations (wilful and otherwise) of their subjects are of course down to me and me alone.
I remain grateful for the guidance and support of Karen Robinson, editor of the Sunday Times Crime Club; Ray Wells also of the Sunday Times; Karen Sullivan of Orenda; Dr Jacky Collins (aka Dr Noir) and Frances Walker; book-seller extraordinaire Fiona Sharp and the team at Durham Waterstones; the Durham crime book group, especially Dan Stubbings and Dave Dawe; and my fellow members of the Northern Crime Syndicate. Particular thanks are due to Bob McDevitt and the Bloody Scotland team for choosing me as a Crime in the Spotlight debut author (and warm-up act for the literary legend David Baldacci) and my fellow Crime in the Spotlight writers, in particular Fiona Erskine, author of The Chemical Detective and my adviser on acoustics and cephalopods.
Thanks as ever to my mother, my husband and my children.