Cry Baby Page 36

  This is my twentieth novel in as many years, and among any number of things that make me realise how lucky I have been over the past two decades is the fact that so many of the people I need to thank have featured on the acknowledgement page of almost every single book. So, thank you, yet again, to my amazing agent, Sarah Lutyens (and Juliet, Francesca and Hana), my eagle-eyed friend Wendy Lee and my partner in crime Mike Gunn.

  Thank you, Hilary Hale and David Shelley, for so much.

  Thank you to the team at Little, Brown which has been my publishing home, and family, for twenty years: Catherine Burke, Charlie King, Robert Manser, Hannah Methuen, Callum Kenny, Thalia Proctor, Tom Webster, Gemma Shelley, Sean Garrehy, Sarah Shrubb and Tamsin Kitson. Thank you again to Nancy Webber for a brilliant copy-edit, and for the stickers!

  Thank you to my brilliant editor Ed Wood and to Laura Sherlock, the best publicist in the business.

  Thank you to all those at Grove Atlantic who continue to fly Tom Thorne’s tatty, beer-stained flag on the other side of the Atlantic – Sara Vitale, Morgan Entrekin, Justina Batchelor and Deb Seager – and to all those at assorted publishing houses worldwide who keep my children in shoes. Danke sehr, Toda, Grazie, Tak, etc . . .

  I want to thank all those writers whose friendship and support has meant and continues to mean so much. The only reason I’m not going to list them is that I’m bound to forget someone and several of them can be touchy, not to say extremely vengeful. But I hope they know who they are. I will name the five who, as fellow Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, have made the last couple of years so much more fun than they would otherwise have been. So, thank you Val, Chris, Stuart, Doug and Luca. We will always have Glastonbury.

  Lastly but not leastly, I need to thank those without whom I would not be sitting down to write these stories at all. I’m talking, of course, about . . . Nando’s, Brewdog and Cadbury’s. Please forgive a cheap joke, made solely in an effort to undercut what some may regard as the cheesiness of this final acknowledgement. I don’t care. Those familiar with my love of country music will know I’m a sucker for the cheese, so just imagine my beloved George Jones breaking your heart, his backing singers in perfect, angelic harmony and the strings swelling behind him as I say a heart-felt thank you so bloody much to all those readers who have stuck with me, and with Tom, for all these years.

  Seriously, without you, there wouldn’t be any point.