For those of you who are just discovering my blog, a little up front information: I’m currently rereading the entire Cork O’Connor series, something I’ve never done. This as a kind of celebration of the fine-looking trade paperback editions of my backlist released this summer. I’ve been waylaid for a while by other concerns, but I’m back on the journey.

While driving on my current book tour, I’ve been listening to the audio version of Copper River done by Recorded Books. It’s a terrific reading by David Chandler. And the story, I have to admit, is pretty damn good, too.

There’s an issue at the heart of Copper River. It’s a book that deals largely with the question of those children in our society who we turn our backs on, the thousands of children who go missing every year and are lost to us. They’ve been abused, abandoned, and become the targets for all kinds of predators. In the Ojibwe culture of old, the children were the responsibility of the entire village. Everyone was “uncle” or “aunt” or “grandmother” or “grandfather.” There are no villages today, not for the Ojibwe and not for the rest of us. And our children suffer for it.

The opening of this book, when I began to conceive it, concerned me. It deals with the killing of a child, which is something I promised myself long ago I would never write. I’m a father, a grandfather. I don’t like to read about children being murdered, so why would I want to write about it? But I knew this was the right opening for the story, and the question was how to compose this scene in such a way that it would be powerful and heartbreaking, but also would not turn readers away. This was the most difficult opening for a book I’ve ever written. And in its way, it may be the best.

What follows is a pretty compelling tale of children who stumble into more than they’ve bargained for, and the adults who step up to the plate to help, Cork O’Connor among them, of course. The story features a kick-ass female security consultant named Dina Wilner (a holdover from the previous book) who, judging from the emails I continue to receive about her, is clearly a favorite with readers.

My own favorite characters in this book are the two teenagers at the heart of the story: Ren and Charlie. Having raised two kids, I recall clearly the teen years. Oh, God, were they tough. Teens are hard on adults. But they’re also vulnerable in so many ways. I tried to capture this dichotomy between the tough surface and all the uncertainty that lies beneath. In the end, I really loved these kids.

This story takes place in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the only Cork book to be set significantly outside Minnesota. And one of the other big challenges was to write it in such a way that even if readers weren’t familiar with Mercy Falls, which sets up the situation of Cork’s retreat to the U.P., they could still fully enjoy the story. If you’re among those who fit this description, I’d love to hear your take on how well I accomplished this.

Listening to the story on tape, honest to God, I kept saying to myself, “This guy’s a pretty good storyteller.” And I love the way this book ends, just language itself. See, I impress myself pretty easily.

Up next, Thunder Bay, which is my favorite book in the series.

See you down the road!

I’m about to embark on another book tour.  This will be my tenth.  Let me tell you about a book tour.

When I began publishing nearly a dozen years ago, the prevailing wisdom was that book tours were an essential part of the promotion of a new work.  The idea, not a bad one, was that readers would be interested in seeing authors in person and hearing what they had to say.  A lot of time, money, and energy went into the planning and execution of a book tour.  The results of the tour were tracked by publishers: How many sales resulted from each store event?  How did the store feel about the event?  Was the event perceived as successful?  For some authors, the cost of the tour was clearly worth the expense.  For others, the results were less clearly favorable—in terms of sales, anyway.  That’s how it was for me, in the beginning.

With my first book, Iron Lake, readers stayed away in droves.  It wasn’t uncommon for me to travel a great distance for an event at which were present only me, the bookseller, and the bookseller’s cat.  I planned and paid for that first tour.  Despite the general lack of crowds at my signings, I never viewed an event as unsuccessful, for several reasons.  First, I was able to make a personal contact with a bookseller.  This was the person who, I knew, would hand sell my work, book after book.  Second, I did sell books.  Booksellers generally told me that as a result of the display both before and after the event, many customers bought Iron Lake.  And third, those few readers who came to an event gave me terrific confirmation for the job I’d done, not only in the writing but in my personal presentation.  I was, they assured me, a big hit.

Over the years, the glow of the book tour has dimmed.  Not for me, but for a lot of writers and for most publishers.  Because almost every writer tours, the appearance at a bookstore of yet another hopeful face has become commonplace.  These days even best-selling authors can’t be certain of drawing a crowd.  Booksellers have become wary of going through all the hassle of promoting a signing that can’t guarantee a turnout.  Now, to the uncertainty about the value of personal appearances, add all the possibilities available through the Internet—viral marketing, web promotion, blogs, MySpace, Facebook—that give an author the opportunity for a breadth of exposure almost unthinkable a dozen years ago and at a fraction of the cost of a national book tour.  From a purely business perspective—bang for your buck–it might seem a no-brainer that the days of book touring have passed.

Me, I don’t think so.  I still do a lot of personal appearances with every book, and for many of the same reasons that compelled me to tour with the first.  I continue to believe that it’s important for an author to make that personal connection, with both booksellers and readers.  Word spreads from a good event—and most of my events these days are good.  It’s always a pleasure to spend a little time with booksellers I’ve come to know well over the years.  And I still get such a thrill out of standing in front of a room full of people who’ve gathered simply because they like my work.  The expense isn’t, I suppose, justified from a strictly business perspective.  But for me, it’s not all about business.  It’s also about art, about community, and about connection.

I still plan my own tours.  I set up the events, buy my airline tickets, book my hotels, rent cars and drive myself around.  My publisher is usually agreeable in helping to finance a tour, but I also kick in a lot of my own money.  In the past, a new book has entailed planning and attending fifty to sixty events in the ten weeks following the release.  This year, I’ve cut back a bit, but I’ve never once considered cutting out a tour completely.  Honestly, if I didn’t tour, I’d feel that the birth of a new book was incomplete somehow.  I’m like a proud father who wants to hold up his newest child for everyone to see.

Maybe this time when I tour, I’ll pass out cigars.

I graduated from high school just over forty years ago.  (Please don’t do the age calculation.)  This past weekend, I attended the 40th reunion of the 1969 graduating class of Hood River High School in Hood River, Oregon.  It was, all things considered, a pretty remarkable experience.

At some point in your lives, most of you have probably attended a high school reunion.  Me, I never had.  This was my first.  And it was a bit unusual because I didn’t really graduate.  I left Hood River just before my senior year, moved to Manteca, California, and finished my schooling there.  But Hood River has always been the alma mater of my heart.

There were issues when I left town years ago.  It was 1968.  We were in the midst of the Vietnam War, one of our most divisive experiences as a nation in modern times.  My father, an English teacher at the high school, was profoundly anti-war, a sentiment that in our small town was not looked upon kindly.  It wasn’t uncommon for me or members of my family to hear unflattering epithets yelled at us from cars passing on the street.  We left Hood River for good reasons, but under a kind of cloud.  And forty years later, as I was contemplating my return, I wondered if some shadow of that cloud might yet remain.

Over forty years, people, of course, change.  But something in them—in their faces, their eyes, even their gestures—often remains the same and beautifully unique.  At the first reunion function, an informal gathering on Friday night, I was astonished at how many people I recognized easily.  Like me, most were grayer and grizzled and thicker and bent a little, yet the seed of who they were long ago, probably the seed of who they were from the very beginning, was still there.

But there was also so much more to them.  Those seeds had grown and, in most cases, blossomed in rich lives.  They were lives that had, for the most part, taken similar shape: marriage, children, careers, grandchildren.  The stories I heard were, generally speaking, not astonishing in their particulars, but they were told with satisfaction.  People were comfortable with who they were and where they were and how they’d come there.

As for me, the most surprising realization was that no one really remembered why my family had left Hood River.  No one really cared about the conflicts of the past.  Time heals in part because it veils.

I did a bunch of typical things a guy might do in this situation.  I drove past the house where my family had lived.  Yes, it’s smaller now.  Visited the high school.  Ditto the size thing.  I searched out, with some difficulty, the home of my high school sweetheart (who was not at the reunion), where, on her doorstep at the age of sixteen, I’d given—or was it received?—my first kiss.  I drove the long valley of the Hood River, a place of astonishing beauty.  And finally I went swimming in the Columbia River, where I lost my cell phone and, for reasons I won’t go into, for a brief time caused some real concern that I might have been swept away in the powerful current of that giant of a river.

Like most people, I tend to measure cost against return.  It took quite a bit to attend my reunion, in money, time, and energy.  (I have a new book out this week, and I should probably have been focusing entirely on that circumstance.)  But in the end, I believe I received something not only worthwhile but also necessary.  Something that feels to me a lot like peace.