Hi reader,

It is a long weekend, which for a certain kind of reader is not a holiday so much as an opportunity. So instead of a new book this week, let me fix something that is genuinely my fault.

If you have ever looked at my thriller shelf and thought two of those series look suspiciously alike, you were right, and the reason is not what you would guess. The Silent Code Series and Silent Code International are not two series. They are one continuous story. Same two people the whole way through: Secret Service agent Emily Jensen and the rogue hacker Jack Carter. The first series is the American half. Then they move to Interpol, the threats stop being domestic, and the second half begins. Presented separately, with similar covers and similar descriptions, they look like competitors. They are chapters of the same life.

So, the map.

Read The Silent Code Series first: Silent Code, then Silent Unrest, Silent Dominion, Silent Threat, Silent Valor.

Then Silent Code International: Silent Collapse, Silent Reckoning, Silent Echo, Silent Mandate.

That order comes off the books' own Also By pages, not off my memory, which I no longer trust on matters of my own back catalogue.

And while you have the map open, here is the other one. The Vale and Ward Files, which is Detective Cassandra Vale, who remembers every day of her life in full and cannot put any of it down, and her partner Ethan Ward: The Echo Man, The Silent Room, The Final Thread, The Honest Man, The Cold Hour. The first three are one conspiracy told across three books. The last two are standalone cases. You can start at Book 4 without being lost, though I would rather you did not.

A taste of the international half. Silent Echo opens in Brussels, and I still think this is the coldest thing I have written, because nothing actually happens in it:

"He saw them from halfway down the street, a quiet thickening of people against the bank's shuttered glass, and his first thought was that there had been an accident. But there was no ambulance, no slick of water on the cobbles, no knot of rubbernecks arranged around a center, the way crowds arrange themselves when there is a thing to see. This crowd had no center. It was arranged around an absence, around his own dark doors, and it stood in the kind of silence crowds only managed when every one of them was looking at a phone."

Nobody attacked the bank. The bank died anyway. That is the whole book in one image, and it is on page one.

And since I have you, a giveaway. I'm giving away one free ebook copy of Feathers and Phantoms, Book Three of the Winifred Baxter Mysteries, this month. An iron key opens Harrow House after thirty-five years, and Winifred's crow refuses to be parted from it. Then the last Merrick dies at the foot of the same tower stair where a young governess died a generation earlier. The town calls it a ghost. The town's beloved doctor calls it a rotten step and enough of this nonsense. They are both wrong.

To enter, reply to this email and answer one question: who would make the better mystery-solving partner, a watchful ghost or an evidence-stealing crow? Send your answer by 11:59 p.m. Mountain Time on September 30. I'll choose one winner at random and email them October 2. No purchase necessary, and you don't need to have read a word of the series to enter. You just need an opinion about ghosts versus crows, and everyone has one.

Want to start something right now, for free? The entire first chapter of The Echo Man is on the site. No download, no waiting on an email, just the chapter. A woman murdered in an abandoned opera house, staged to match a killer who stopped in 1999, and a detective who has not forgotten a single case in twenty-two years. Read it here.

If you would rather read the newest one. Feathers and Phantoms, the paranormal cozy, has been out a couple of weeks now, and Bonneville Shadows since early August, which is the opposite kind of book entirely: a geologist dead on the salt flats and a machine buried under the Bonneville that can reach into a room and edit what everyone in it remembers.

The ask. Reviews in the first weeks decide whether a book finds readers or quietly does not. If any of mine landed for you this summer, two minutes and whatever you actually thought would help more than you would think.

And if you would rather read me early and free from now on, join Read It First and tick the Jessie Clark box: an advance copy about three weeks before release, for one honest review.

Worth a listen this weekend. The house podcast is Story Worlds, on YouTube, and it opens with "Every Book Is a Doorway." If you have ever wondered how the same hand writes a cozy about a woman who talks to crows and a thriller about a bank that dies without being attacked, that is the conversation. Watch here or subscribe to the channel here.

Two earlier letters, if you missed them. The one about the iron key that would not stay in the bowl is here and the letter about the woman who has been pointing for thirty-five years is a companion to it, here.

One question, and I would like a real answer. When you find a series you love, do you go back and start at Book 1 properly, or do you just keep reading forward from wherever you landed? I have strong feelings and no evidence. Hit reply.

Happy reading,

Jessie Clark

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