I just wanted to tell you that I did enjoy my first reading of you and intend to now go catch up on the rest of your work!

I started reading The Apprentice because I didn’t know you had a series. But I wasn’t to worried I started from the beginning and caught up to my Nanny within a few weeks. (I read all your books haha.) Most the time I read books out of chronological order because I get them from the library until I can afford them, and people have the next one in the series hired out etc. It’s so, so frustrating! Yours are so popular the copies the library has aren’t in very often. Not many people know about using the online service to put them on hold. *evil smile* and I did, so I put each one on hold while I read the one before hand, and I got them all in perfect timing without having to wait at all!

Re: Rizzoli vs. Jane — I made the conscious choice to use “Jane” after she started getting a lot more likable in later books. Suddenly she didn’t seem like a cold hard Rizzoli anymore.

I’ve discovered two things. One, endings are the most critical part of the book. The reader wants a big explosion to go off in his/her head. They want to be Wow!ed. The quality of the ending is usually how they judge the book. Knock their socks off in the last few chapters and they will leave the book satisfied.

Second, readers want loose ends tied up. They want to know that the author wasn’t just bluffing, that the author was actually smart enough to inject a sub-plot, or a question, or a character, and then show that it was there for a purpose as opposed to just filler. They want to know what happened to Character X back in chapter 4–did he die, or what?

IMO, a “series” writer can satisfy both of these (give a Wow! ending and tie up loose ends) by then injecting the next huge question at the end of the book, which of course leads to the next installment.

As for LOTR, this was the only movie series in which I literally fell asleep three times – in each one. And from what I’ve seeen, heard and read in the media, I’m not the only one. Impressive at times, but sooooo boring at most of the other times. It’s one of those trilogies which, if one of them was on TV, I would not know if it was 1, 2 or 3 playing. But The Godfather trilogy? There’s no way you could confuse any of them. You would know.

Since you mentioned the consummation of the Maura/Daniel love interest, I have to say that, having waited a couple of years for this big event to take place, it does seem strange that it happens within hours of Maura’s discovery of a gruesome corpse….I thought this to be rather odd timing! If I found someone I knew savagely hacked to death, I don’t expect I’d be in bed with a priest later the same day, even if I was a medical examiner! Unless I was the killer asking for forgiveness maybe. Still, who says fiction has to reflect reality?

The best series are those that satisfactorily wrap up the main plot point (the crime), but leave some other plot dangling – like Maura and Daniel. I still can’t decide whether they should or shouldn’t get together, and it’s to your credit that I’m wavering and will keep reading.

It’s a hook that I appreciate, even if some readers want instant gratification between the book covers.

As for LOTR, not one of those whingers would have sat through the complete trilogy if it had been made as one movie – it would have been far too long to hold their attention.

I’ve read your books since your Harlequin days and you’d have to write at least three spectacular disasters for me to stop now; and I don’t see that happening any time soon.

You’ve every right to be pissy with those readers who want to be spoon fed their fiction. Luckily, your fan base is expanding so we can ignore them. Name names, we’ll send them e-mails explaining how a series works; it will be an education for them.

An old pro screenwriter once told me “Make ‘em love, make ‘em hate, make ‘em wait.” Good advice. It’s how you keep them coming back for more. If you make them wait, of course some will complain, but if you don’t, most won’t come back. Tell them gourmet meals are meant to be savored, not devoured.

Of course if you make them wait forever, a lot of us will abandon you too. The X files to me was all promises (the truth is out there) and no delivery. By the time I hear they got there, I’d left the building and forgotten the question.

The recent TV miniseries, “The Lost Room” did it nicely. The hero gets his daughter back (the main plot driving force), but the magical objects are still out there. LOTR was difficult because it was written as a single work, but to publish it (or make a film of it) in a reasonable size, they split it up.

I think part of the problem is that not all series are created equal. Some have progressive subplots interwoven between installments, and others are stand alone volumes where the main character has a new adventure independent of anything that happened before.

Think of the Nancy Drew stories which are formulaic with a protagonist who never ages, and never winds up getting married to her boyfriend Ned Nickerson. As a young girl I didn’t realize that fact and I kept thinking that the *next* volume they’d get engaged.

Ellery Queen series was the same thing. Different week and a different murder case that the hapless Inspector Queen couldn’t solve and so his son would come in and crack the case.

When you look at other media series such as television, some shows have progressive storylines with character development and subplots while others don’t. “Seinfeld” had a little progression, but mostly it was a different day a different kvetch. “The Simpsons” may have anything happen including space aliens abducting the entire family at the end of the show, but next week’s episode will start with Homer back at work at the Nuclear Power Plant in Springfield as if nothing transpired the week before.

Then there are the movies. I would suggest that most movie franchises are created due to box office receipts rather than a plan from the beginning to tell a story in multiple parts. Look at most movie sequels, they were made because the previous movie was a success and so the studios wanted to capitalize on its audience wanting more of the story.

The Star Wars franchise is kind of a mixture of planned series as well as sequels due to success. If the initial movie of “Star Wars” later retitled “A New Hope” had not been successful, none of the other movies would have been made. So it was absolutely necessary in order to establish the franchise that the initial movie have a satisfying ending, yet allow enough loose ends to allow for a sequel. (Darth Vader escaping death and able to come back to vex our hero another day.)

That is what most movie audiences expect: a satisfying ending to a movie, but leaving things open for a sequel. They are not used to a story being told in multiple parts where the endings are truly open ended. Which is why many audience members complained about the ending of LotR I. It did not “satisfy” their expectations of a stand-alone movie.

Overall, I don’t think it hurt the LotR franchise since the audience grew with each installment.

So, getting back to mystery series and progressive subplots, I think part of the confusion you have gotten in feedback from some of your fans might lie in the idea that they were unaware of your series or other series as being constructed in a sequential manner. It would be helpful for authors writing progressive subplots if on the spine it had a number to tell someone that the book the overall placement of that volume in a series. Then if they proceeded by starting with volume 3, they should be aware that they might not understand everything because they had not started at the beginning.

I hope that helps to give you some new perspectives about people being confused about series, because they aren’t all created the same.

Linda