Dear Burning Questions:
In April, I thought Judith McNaught was to have a new book out, then it got postponed. Do you have the status of when she will next publish a book?

Gloria Brubaker
via e-mail

Slippery things, those publication dates. Water's Edge will be released in late December by Pocket Books.

Dixie chick

Dear Burning Questions:
Would you please tell me if Alabama writer Nancy Kincaid has any new projects on the way? I've read all three of her books, Balls, Crossing Blood and Pretending the Bed Is a Raft, and I'm anxious to read more!

A. Willis
via e-mail

We recently spoke to Nancy Kincaid from her home in Arizona, and she let us in on her works in progress. Kincaid says she's got two books going at once, but has set one set aside to concentrate on the other. Her next novel has the tentative title Vena and Lucky, and is set in Kincaid's home state of Alabama. Coming from a "blended family," Kincaid found herself writing about second marriages, in which different families come together and bring other people to the relationship. She plans to complete the draft in December. Her other book is set in Wetumpka, Alabama, in the Julia Tutwiler Women's Prison. To lend a sense of reality to the novel, Kincaid has made two visits to the prison to talk to inmates, and this spring returned to hold a five-day workshop. Kincaid says this novel began as a character-driven story of woman who killed her husband, but "it's become more complicated than that." We can't wait to see for ourselves.

What folly!

Dear Burning Questions, I'm a devoted fan of Laurie King (especially her Kate Martinelli series). What does she have on the horizon?

via email

In February Laurie King brings us Folly (Bantam), the story of Rae Newborn, a woman on the edge who has moved to Folly Island to restore the house of her mysterious great-uncle. King is the author of four Kate Martinelli detective novels and five mysteries featuring Sherlock Holmes' young apprentice, Mary Russell. King lives in northern California, where she is at work on the sixth book in the Mary Russell series.

A little bit of nostalgia

Dear Burning Questions,
Ed Gorman's two McCain novels, Wake Up Little Susie and The Day the Music Died, give lie to the bromide "You can't judge a book by its cover." Both are dead-on recreations of the early 1960s‹my adolescent years. McCain himself is scarce removed from his boyhood and those "innocent" times when he is forced to confront the evil and wrong-doing so incongruous with small-town Iowa. Please profile this Edgar-winning author and tell me that McCain will have a long literary life locked in the '60s.

John Miller
South Bend, Indiana

Kirkus Reviews recently noted that "Ed Gorman is the only serious rival [Lawrence Block] has among contemporary writers of crime short stories." Not that this kind of recognition has come quickly or easily. Gorman has published more than 30 books (novels and collections of his stories) in 20 years of writing. He has written in many different genres‹crime, horror, westerns, science fiction‹and only recently, with his Sam McCain novels, started to attract wide reviewer attention. He lives in Iowa with his wife, novelist Carol Gorman, his two grandchildren and three cats. As for the McCains, Gorman tells BookPage, "I hope to do at least a dozen novels in the McCain saga. This is the only series I've ever really enjoyed writing, except for two serio-comic mysteries about a five-foot-five alcoholic film critic that reviewers liked and nobody bought. Fortunately, the McCains seem to be finding an audience. I think I enjoy writing them because they're funny and a little bit nostalgic and yet give a truer, grittier picture of the '50s and '60s than you find in the Happy Days sort of thing." Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, the third McCain novel, will be out in December from Carroll & Graf.