North Africa enters the book through the back door — a beach landing, a market stall, a meeting in a back room where nobody wants to be seen. Most of those scenes started as field notes from quiet streets and crowded medinas.
Here are a few of the research notes I kept — the look of a port at dawn, the smell of a souk in late summer, the way a fixer reads a stranger — and how they ended up shaping the world Blake gets pulled into.