When The Devine Trilogy launched in 2023, Level Best Books and I had a simple game plan for rolling out the books. The first one in the series, PUBLIC MORALS, came out in November 2023, shortly after I retired from The New York Times. Its sequel, SPECIAL VICTIM, became available a year later. The third and concluding novel, STOP AND FRISK, was scheduled for publication in late 2025.
Some of you may have noticed that the book isn’t available yet, and that’s on me.
I had pitched the trilogy to publishers and agents for several years, and gotten nowhere. And there were other things I wanted to work on. After I wrote the first chapter of STOP AND FRISK, I told myself I wouldn’t do anything else on it until somebody showed interest. So, when Level Best accepted the trilogy in early 2023, the first two novels were essentially completed. There’s always work to do after a book has been accepted — cover designs, jacket copy, final edits, galleys, all that neat stuff — but as far as I was concerned, the heavy lifting on those two was over, and I wanted to move on.
So I worked on other manuscripts (I now have drafts of two standalone novels taking up disc space in my computer) and wasn’t even thinking much about the trilogy until it drew interest from Level Best. Our back and forth did not last long, the trilogy was set up, and I thought, “Well, how hard is it gonna be to finish the third book?”
Harder than I imagined, as it turned out.
Part of the problem may have been regaining momentum on a project I had put aside. Part of the problem may have been overconfidence by yours truly. I’d written two novels that featured many of these characters, and I knew them well, so I figured the story would just roll along, But it didn’t. I encountered the stops, starts, digressions, dead ends and tangents that I face every time I begin a new project. In the end, writing two earlier novels in the series didn’t help me at all.
I wound up submitting the manuscript ten months after I was supposed to. I want to thank Deb Well and Shawn Reilly Simmons, my editors at Level Best, for their patience. They never bothered me after I told them I wasn’t going to meet the original deadline.
By the time I turned in the manuscript, Level Best’s publication schedule was set for many months. A proposed date in November 2026 didn’t work for me (I’ll be out of the country), and many slots in early 2027 were already taken. Which means that STOP AND FRISK will be published on April 6, 2027.
And that gives me plenty of time to contemplate the fact that I have turned into one of those tardy writers that I used to yell at when I was an editor at The New York Times.
