Mr. Cornwell, Regarding maps – I did a quick search on the Bulletin Board Archives for maps, and saw a couple posts inquiring about maps (or the lack thereof) in some of your books. I’m reading the first of the Grail Quest series, and I’m actually astonished there aren’t some maps, or even a single map, detailing France and the key regions and battles in the book. With all the movement of troops and characters, across multiple rivers, cities and towns, it gets extremely frustrating for the reader not to have some kind of reference. I just finished Lonesome Dove and that highly acclaimed novel was plagued by the same problem – simply amazing to me when the heart of the story deals with such a significant amount of travel. I think you mentioned how the publisher removes maps due to cost, but I think it’s totally unacceptable – a map for historical novels isn’t some small ‘extra’ or ‘add-on’ – without a map, it detracts from the reader’s experience and I think negatively impacts the book’s delivery. I guess I sound pretty frustrated; I find your books to be fantastic, other than this one seriously annoying issue. One potential solution (or workaround) that perhaps the publisher could accept: Provide an online map for each book – this way your readership can access a map off your web site, perhaps print it for reference. Sam Scharpf