Dear Mr. Cornwell, I can’t fully explain just how much I have enjoyed your books over the past year or so. I stumbled upon them after reading a very positive review that Orson Scott Card gave of Agincourt when it came out and I haven’t stopped reading them since. My question is this: why did you decide to make the narrators of both the Arthur and Saxon books outsiders in much the same way? Is there something about an outsider as a narrator that makes the job of telling a story easier? Though both Derfel and Uhtred are ethnically Saxons they are each playing for the other side, as it were. Is that just because as an Englishman yourself you thought it would be fun to have the narrators of each series be Englishmen in the same way? (That seems as good a reason as any, I mean results are excellent and speak for themselves.) I haven’t read that many of your books yet, am I just looking at two superficial similarities and seeing a pattern where there is none? Warmest Regards Jacob Smith

p.s. I do believe it is possible for a modern person with scientific training to be a believer in religion. I like to hope that I can be a believer (in my case in Mormonism) and still be intellectually consistent and morally decent without falling too far into the traps of hypocrisy or mean spiritedness. You have never said otherwise. Heck, if anything I imagine you are being kind in your treatment of Christianity. I am just saying, I believe in science and in being a decent human being and I think my religious convictions help me be better than I might be otherwise.