AUTHOR’S NOTE

 

 

Many of my longtime readers are aware of my connection to Malta, but for those of you who are new to my novels, let me take a moment to explain how I fell in love with this amazing country in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.

My first international bestseller was a religious thriller called Sign of the Cross. Although it was the second book in the Payne & Jones series, it was the novel that allowed me to quit teaching to become a full-time writer. Back then, social media was in its infancy, but I encouraged readers to contact me via email through my website.

As a new author, I loved keeping track of where my fan mail came from. At first, it was strictly from North America, but once the British version of the book was released, I started to get mail from overseas: England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. After years of grinding, and rejections, and wondering if my books would be published in the United States, much less anywhere else, it’s impossible to describe how exciting it was to hear from readers across the Atlantic.

As surreal as it was to have fans in the United Kingdom, at least I could figure out how they had heard of me. Penguin UK was based in London, and there had been a huge promotional campaign for the book, which ended up debuting on the Sunday Times bestseller’s list. So fan mail from that part of the world made sense to me on some level. But what didn’t make sense at all was the letter I received from Malta.

For one reason or another, that completely blew my mind.

Obviously I had heard of Malta, but I knew very little about the country. So little, in fact, that I couldn’t comprehend how a copy of my book had ended up in the middle of the Mediterranean. Although my agents had sold the foreign rights to Sign of the Cross to publishers around the globe, I knew I didn’t have a publisher in Malta, so I wrote back to the reader (Robbie Govus) with more questions for him than he had for me.

Truth be told, I felt like Payne and Jones trying to solve a mystery.

Eventually I learned that Malta was part of the British book distribution channel, and the reader had purchased a UK paperback from a store in Malta. And yet, all I can remember thinking was that my novel had somehow made it to the middle of the Mediterranean. As a neophyte author, I thought that was the coolest thing in the world!

By then, I had already finished writing Sword of God and was starting to work on The Lost Throne. Just for fun, I decided to mention Malta in the book—not only as an inside joke for me, but also as a reward for the fan. I figured, he had given me a huge thrill by writing to me, so I would do the same for him by mentioning his homeland in my book. Unwilling to mess with a good thing, I did it again in The Prophecy and have continued the tradition ever since, always finding a way to mention Malta in my novels.

Honestly, I didn’t think that anyone else would even notice. Like most authors, I fill my books with inside jokes that are meant for a select few, and I figured that’s what this would be—merely an Easter egg for a loyal fan. But everything changed when I received an email from a Maltese journalist named Stephen Calleja.

After spotting the reference to Malta in The Lost Throne, he reached out to me to find out if I had a personal connection to his country. Unbeknownst to me, his homeland tended to be excluded in maps of Europe that were used by authors in my genre, so he was beyond thrilled to see Malta actually mentioned in the story itself. Once I explained the reason why, he wrote an article for his newspaper that detailed my interaction with the fan from Malta and my decision to include Malta in future books.

Obviously this was very well received in Malta, a place filled with tremendous pride for its unique history and culture. So much so, that the Malta Tourism Authority invited me to Valletta in 2015 to thank me for spreading the word about their country by showing me (and two of my author friends, Graham Brown and Boyd Morrison) the best that Malta had to offer. Not only did the MTA invite us to the Mediterranean, but we were given private access to several of Malta’s most important documents and historical sites. Needless to say, we were blown away by their hospitality and have viewed Malta as our home away from home since that once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

Much of that trip was portrayed in the details of this story—including the author book event that was described in Chapter 8. I vaguely remember seeing Payne and Jones walk past on their way to Cinnabon, but I was so distracted by the two beautiful women (Anna Gauci and Randi Morrison), the Maltese journalist (Stephen Calleja), and the large crowd of local readers that I was unable to warn the duo about the troubles that lay ahead.

And it’s a good thing, too, or else this book wouldn’t exist.