My publisher tells me that ABSENT FRIENDS has been picked up as a Featured Alternate by the Mystery Guild, and will also be used by the Book of the Month Club. Those are good things, and this is better: it's also going to used by the Literary Guild. The advances a writer gets from book clubs like these are small, but the validation your book gets from that postage-stamp picture of your cover on the back of the book review sections of newspapers is enormous. And for the Literary Guild to have picked the book up is a sign that the attempt to break it out of a purely crime characterization and find it a wider audience may be working.