Thanks for the response. It's always appreciated!

I certainly understand business practicalities and that part makes perfect sense. I didn’t intentionally play that card and I am sorry it came out that way.

I do recall now that you previously said you felt THE HAUNTED MESA was problematic from an audio book standpoint. I “read” books these days mostly via audiobooks, and know how important the reader is to its success. My beloved NERO WOLFE novels are unlistenable; with a reader who decidedly does NOT sound like Archie Goodwin by any stretch of the imagination, instead coming across like a stuffy college professor with a rich, irritating baritone. Jeezuz. But when it’s done right, you get something like Stacy Keach reading Spillane’s MIKE HAMMER books, and it doesn’t get any better than that. The LL audiobooks I’ve heard so far do pretty well…I just finished FAIR BLOWS THE WIND and I liked the reader very much on that one. He seemed to “get” LL and his cadence.

I remember that MESA was met with some lukewarm reviews by critics when it was published, when compared to LL's other hardcover successes in those last years. Admittedly it’s been years since I read it and perhaps it won't hold up now. I'll give it a go again. Just now reading the first couple of pages, I can hear the narrator in my head sounding an awful lot like the late Richard Crenna…unfortunately