The Searchers: Siege of Stone (Avon Books, 1999)

The third volume in The Searchers series took place in Scotland, where I’d vacationed several years earlier. I tried to leave the final volume slightly open-ended in case the publisher wanted me to continue the series. No such luck. Each subsequent volume sold less than the one before, partly due to the fact that the publisher made the print run smaller with each volume, thus creating the self-fulfilling prophecy they’d begun with the marketing department’s decision to make the covers appear as derivative as possible.

An interesting footnote: a year or so after this final volume came out I sold a book on eBay to Timothy Binga for the CSICOP (The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) library. When I sent the book, I also sent a set of the trilogy, with a letter explaining what my purpose had been with the books, to actually further CSICOP’s cause by urging readers to become more skeptical about the paranormal. Binga actually reviewed the books on CSICOP’s website, and was very complimentary about them and my effort to bring a bit of enlightenment to readers.