I’m sitting in my hotel room in the Hilton Garden Inn, getting mentally geared up for book tour. Actually, there’s little “gearing up” to do, because I’m feeling so accustomed to the whole process. In some ways, going on book tour feels a bit like a vacation (crazy, huh?) because I don’t have to cook dinner, I get to watch TV in bed, and I can gorge on all the gossip magazines I pick up from the airport newsstands.

I love book tours.

I don’t like the travel anxieties and the airline snafus, but I love the whole idea of getting out of Maine and seeing the rest of the country. If it hadn’t been for book travel, I would never have seen Mobile AL or Little Rock, Arkansas or West Texas. I’m a sucker for small American towns. I’m a sucker for obscure regional foods. Get me out into the heartland, and I’ll find something to love, even if the only thing the town seems to offer is a diner and a gas station.

This tour, I’m not visiting any really small towns, but I’ll be looking for local culinary quirks to sample. A chef’s daughter is always on the lookout for something she’s never tasted before.

Tomorrow, I’ll be in Nashville. Hope to see some of you there! (And I’m bringing my shrunken head.)

I am obsessive-compulsive about being on time. I freak out when I know I’m going to arrive late for an appointment, a dinner date, or — worst of all — a booksigning event. So I always leave myself a comfortable margin of time for travel, preferring to arrive at a store way too early rather than cutting my arrival too close to the appointed hour.

So you can imagine how uptight I was on Thursday afternoon when I got stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic en route to my signing in South Portland, Maine. My event was scheduled for 7 PM. It usually takes about an hour and a half to drive from my house to South Portland. I left my home at 3:30, allowing myself time for a leisurely stop at McDonald’s for dinner. (McDonald’s frequently plays a large part in the life of the touring author. I make no apologies for my French fry addiction.) I was happily zipping down Route 1 when, just outside the town of Wiscasset, the traffic suddenly halted. A line of cars stretched ahead of me, all the way to the horizon.

No problem, I thought. I’d given myself an extra TWO HOURS to arrive at the store. At the very worst, I’d have to wolf down my dinner a little faster than I wanted to.

An hour later, my car had moved maybe a hundred feet. My stomach was growling. Any hope of dinner was fast fading away.

Yet another hour later, my car was still stuck in Wiscasset. Traffic had scarcely moved. Now I was panicking, because I knew there was no way I would be on time. As the minutes ticked by, I made a series of phone calls to Borders, each one more despairing.

“I’m stuck in traffic. I may be a few minutes late.”
Then: “I’m still in Wiscasset! I’m so, so sorry! I’ll be a half hour late.”
Then: “I’m still stuck in this (expletive deleted) traffic, in this (expletive deleted) town, and I don’t know when I’ll get there. But I (expletive deleted) well will get there.” (Well, okay. I didn’t really use those expletives over the phone. But I thought them.)

I told Borders that if customers had to leave, I would be happy to sign any books they left for me. I also said that no matter what time I arrived, I would give my talk, if anyone wanted to listen. I’d even stand on my head, anything to make it up to those forced to wait. I imagined my readers getting more and more irritated with me, muttering darkly that the author didn’t respect them enough to be on time. I imagined them walking off in a huff, tossing my books aside.

When I finally did arrive at the bookstore, I was 45 minutes late. I did not expect anyone to still be waiting around for me. I dashed into the store, bypassing the ladies’ room (which by that time I desperately needed to use) and headed straight for the events area.

To my amazement, customers were still sitting there, even though they’d been warned that the author might not show up till much later. “We talked about it among ourselves, and we decided you were worth the wait,” one of them told me.

It’s moments like those when I realize how lucky I am to have such wonderful readers.

Considering how unpredictable travel is, it’s amazing how rarely I’ve missed, or been late for, an author event. This is my twelfth national book tour. During all those tours, I’ve had my share of delayed flights, thunderstorms, traffic jams, and no-show drivers, but I can remember only two tours when I actually had to cancel events. The first aborted tour was halted because of 9/11, when I suddenly found myself stranded in Seattle for two weeks. The second interrupted tour was after I herniated a disc in my neck, and needed urgent surgery. (Although I confess I considered going ahead with the tour anyway, with a suitcase of narcotics in tow.)

My national tour for THE KEEPSAKE is just getting started. Airports are chaos, the weather is weird, and my bookstore events are lined up like a series of dominoes, just waiting for something to go wrong and topple the whole schedule. I just hope that all my readers are as patient and understanding as those customers in South Portland’s Borders Thursday night.

I’m trying my best to get to you. I really am.

For two weeks only (9/11 - 9/25) you can download an e-book of THE SURGEON for free! If you have either a Kindle or a Sony E-reader, click on the links below to get your free e-copy of the first book in the Jane Rizzoli series:

Free Kindle e-book of THE SURGEON.

Free Sony e-book of THE SURGEON.

The offer expires at midnight September 25.

If you’ve never read me before, here’s your chance to give one of my thrillers a try — at no cost. And you’ll be starting off with the very first book in the Jane Rizzoli series — a great way to be introduced to Jane when she first appeared in the world of fiction!

A fun article in my local paper. It also has a photo of me and my mom.

Once again, I have a favor to ask of you all. I’d love to find out in which stores THE KEEPSAKE has arrived, and how it’s being displayed. So the next time you’re in a bookstore, take note of where the copies are displayed, and drop me an email. And also let me know your mailing address — I’ll send you some bookmarks!

In all the hubbub and activity of getting my mom moved and settled in here in Maine, I’ve scarcely had time to think about the other big event this week, the event I’ve been waiting for all year: the release of my new book, THE KEEPSAKE.

It goes on sale today. Over at Murderati I’ve just blogged about what it feels like to have a new book come out. Hop on over there, if you’d like to know what neurotic writers (or maybe all writers?) experience with the release of a new book.

And here’s a piece I wrote for Amazon.com about THE KEEPSAKE, in case you’re wondering how on earth I happened to write a book about such weird archaeological topics:

Everybody loves mummies, and I’m no exception. I was an anthropology student in college, and I spent many hours in the Stanford University Museum basement, examining and cataloguing boxes of human remains from North American burial sites. But ancient Egypt has held my deepest fascination, and I don’t think I’m alone in this fascination. In any museum, you’ll find that everyone seems to crowd around the Egyptian mummy exhibits. We all want to know about mummies, and how they were made.

I discovered that there are about 250 mummies in the United States, many of them brought back as souvenirs by American tourists over a hundred years ago. In the 1800’s, you could buy a mummy in Egypt for only five dollars. I’m astonished and appalled that anyone would consider human remains as a souvenir, but in those days, Americans and Europeans had little respect for the dead of Egypt. And so they brought them home. They’d hold unwrapping parties for their friends, peeling away the linen strips to reveal the corpses beneath. Countless mummies were exported, and here in America, they ended up in the most unlikely of places. In antique shops, in attics, in freak shows. And in museums.

In the early days of Egyptology, mummies were certainly not treated with respect. But modern Egyptologists no longer unwrap them to study them; instead, mummies are studied using noninvasive techniques such as X-rays and CT scans, which give us an intimate view of the corpses without damaging them. I had the privilege of watching just such a CT scan myself, where the secrets of a mummy were revealed — everything from his sex to his age to the cause of death.

This is where the idea of THE KEEPSAKE came from. What if a Boston museum discovers a 2,000-year-old Egyptian mummy in the basement? What if they proceeded to study it, and sent it to a hospital for a CT scan? What if they discover something shocking: a bullet in the leg?

Suddenly, this becomes a homicide case. It draws the atatention of Detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles, who must track down a killer who has obscure archaeological knowledge. A killer who has been preserving his victims using gruesome ancient techniques.

THE KEEPSAKE allowed me to delve into some of the most bizarre and frightening ancient rituals. Did you ever wonder how the Egyptians mummified a body? Or how headhunters could shrink a human head to a fraction of its size? This killer knows.

And by the end of THE KEEPSAKE, so will you.

El Indio Restaurant, San Diego

You’re looking at an icon from my childhood: the El Indio Restaurant on India Street in San Diego. For as long as I can remember, visiting El Indio with my dad was the highlight of the week. We’d buy their beef taquitos, garnished with shredded lettuce and salsa. They were rolled up in butcher paper, six to a packet, and I remember how eagerly I’d tear open the packet, releasing their savory fragrance. Whenever I bit into one, all was right with the world. Wherever I’ve lived in the world, wherever I’ve traveled, when I was under stress, I’d find myself craving one of those taquitos.

Last week, reeling from the emotional turmoil of emptying out my mom’s house in San Diego, I desperately needed an El Indio fix. So that’s where I headed.

The place has changed, of course. It used to be merely a tortilla factory that served food on the side; now it’s grown and has become so popular that the line of customers often stretches out the door. It’s even made it onto the culinary radar of Food TV.

But it will always be my El Indio, and a reminder of just how powerful childhood memories can be — especially memories of food. Food, I think, is what culture is really all about. Dishes that our mothers cooked for us. The particular melange of spices in our mothers’ kitchens.

When I write my books, I find myself often using food to evoke mood or character or relationships. Jane Rizzoli sits in her childhood kitchen and marvels at her mother’s exquisite cooking. Maura Isles sits alone and depressed at her kitchen table and dines on gin and a grilled cheese sandwich. A harried doctor slaps together a dinner of scrambled eggs. What we eat — and the care with which we prepare it — speaks volumes about our feelings at that moment.

And so, while I sat at El Indio last week, emotionally wrung out by the emotional demands of my San Diego visit, I found that biting into a taquito was almost a desperate act, precisely the sort of therapy that the daughter of a chef would crave.

Forget drugs; all I require is salsa.

I am in California, packing up my mom’s house in preparation for her move to be closer to me in Maine. It’s been physically and emotionally exhausting, and I’ve had no time to blog, much less think about books or writing. For the past three days, every lamp, every chair, every dish had to be categorized as “take” or “give away.” Since my mom’s moving from a three-bedroom house into a one-bedroom apartment, there’s a lot of stuff, including sentimental items, that must be winnowed down. And with the moving company people standing around waiting for instructions as to what to carry into the truck, and my mom hemming and hawing and sometimes flaring up in anger that I’m “making” her choose when she doesn’t want to, I’ve really wanted to escape into some fictional world. Even a fictional world involving serial killers.

So for the time being, I’m not thinking about the next story. I’m just trying to get through the day.

It makes me anxious to get back to my desk — because at least, on paper, I can control my universe!

It’s my day to post over at Murderati.com.

I’ve come across yet another novelist who claims to be “the number one internationally bestselling author.”  This isn’t just your standard hype put out by an overzealous publicist; this actually appears on the author’s own website.  It makes me roll my eyes, because unless your last name is Rowling, Grisham, Brown, or Meyer, it’s pretty hard to back up such a claim.   Yet it’s a boast that I’m hearing more and more these days, and I’ve wondered how authors can justify it.  Does “Number One” mean that one of your titles was the top selling book in the world?  Does it mean you’ve sold more books overall than anyone else around the world? 

I think I’ve now figured out what that term “number one internationally bestselling author” has come to mean, in this age of hype and exaggeration.  It means that, somewhere in the world, one of your books hit #1 on a bestseller list.  Even if the only place you were a #1 bestseller was in Inner Mongolia, you can claim primacy in the international book world.  I know it sounds nutty, but that seems to be the new definition.  Although I’ve hit #1 in the UK and in Germany, I’d be embarrassed to claim such a crown because it sounds grandiose and delusional.  It makes me think of Jack standing at the bow of the Titanic, crowing to the world: “I’m king of the world!”

And we all know what happened to him.

These exaggerations seem to be rampant in publishing.  Books are frequently touted as “bestsellers” or “international bestsellers”.  The problem is, there’s no firm definition of what these words mean.  Publishers have slapped the “bestselling” label on so many books that the word itself has lost its significance.  Was the book a bestseller on the New York Times, or in the author’s home town?  Maybe in the local Waldenbooks?  Hitting the list in any of these venues now qualifies a book for the label.

Likewise, wildly exaggerated numbers are bandied about when referring to how many books an author has sold.  Journalists always ask me for that number, and I’ve come up with the answer of fifteen million, but the truth is, I honestly don’t know.  I’ve written 21 books that are now published in 33 countries.  Foreign royalty statements are often indecipherable.  I don’t have a tally of my sales through direct-mail book clubs, which alone probably total in the seven figures.  Nine of my books have hit the NYT bestseller list so far, and hopefully THE KEEPSAKE will be #10.  To my astonishment, the re-releases of my old romance novels are now hitting top-10 lists overseas.  So I think I’m being pretty safe when I throw out that number fifteen million.  But as I say, I’m just guessing. 

The truth, however, often gets lost in an industry where everyone’s trying to look more golden than they really are.  Some authors claim gazillions of sales, but those of us who watch the numbers know those claims are certainly bogus.  Some authors pump up the numbers by instead citing how many of their books are “in print”, which is more a reflection of how foolhardy their publishers were, rather than how many books actually sold.

So the next time you hear an author refer to himself or herself as the “number one bestselling author,” take it with a huge grain of salt.  Unless her name is Rowling.