Have you ever heard the term, Mentor Book? To me, it suggests the books on my shelf that kind of taught me what I wanted to write, based on what I absolutely love reading. That shelf is deep and wide. It includes authors from Kate Atkinson, Patricia Highsmith, Jacqueline Winspeare, Cara Black, and Tana French to Kate Quinn. When one of my books gets compared to one of theirs in a review, well I’m over the moon. I was so happy when my distributor, Simon & Schuster , chose both Winspeare and Quinn books as comparable to An Unlikely Prospect.

It was such a pleasure then to see Kate Quinn at the Historical Novel Society Conference and to discover that her in-person self was every bit as delightful as her book voice is. She’s smart, well-researched, and very very funny.

So, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to consider Quinn’s The Briar Club (and all the others on my mentor shelf) big sisters to An Unlikely Prospect. This is what they call a made family.