But I’m glad you asked. I have visions of the purple sky that night and when I am most fatigued they come to me, unbidden but not as unwelcome as you might suppose. I know there was all that talk about how we christened ourselves the lions of Hollywood, but I really do see myself in my mind as a lioness on that branch. （God, once upon a time they called Katie a lioness. Do you remember? Before he died, Reggie Stout called me that, and I almost wept.） Once more I am witness to that shooting star and I hear myself asking Reggie if he saw it too. Same with the azure sounds of the birds and the resolute snorting of the wildebeest. We all look forward—at least, I suppose, until you get to be my age—but how we see tomorrow is grounded so deeply in what we lived through just yesterday.
And it was only yesterday, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
—Carmen Tedesco,
transcript of the last recorded interview.
（The full story ran in the
Los Angeles Times, June 21, 2022.）
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I went to the Serengeti to research this novel a few months before COVID-19 shut down the planet. I wrote most of this book while sheltering in place in 2020, the Year That Satan Spawned. Telling a story set well over a half century earlier helped keep me sane. But my memories of the Serengeti also encouraged me to remember that while the world in 2020 seemed awash in horror, there also remained great beauty on Earth. My gratitude to my safari guides is immense, because of their encyclopedic knowledge and their endless patience with my questions. （Also? Their humor when my questions would probe just how many ways there are to die in the Serengeti made the interviews as much fun as any I’ve ever conducted in my life.）
Many of the books that I read for research—though not all—were dated. That was by design, because this novel is set in 1964 and I wanted to immerse myself in that era. Those books included the following:
Charles A. Cabell III and David St. Clair, Safari: Pan Am’s Guide to Hunting with Gun and Camera Round the World
Harold T. P. Hayes, The Last Place on Earth
Adam Hochschild, Lesson from a Dark Time and Other Essays
Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control
Martin Meredith, The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence
Rachel Love Nuwer, Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking
John Pearson, Wildlife and Safari in Kenya
Robert Ruark, Uhuru
Robert Ruark, Use Enough Gun
I also reread stories by Ernest Hemingway and novels by Chinua Achebe, Joseph Conrad, and Barbara Kingsolver. I perused copies of Africana, a magazine focused on safari tourism, from the 1960s and early 1970s. I studied the ads as well as the articles.
Jennifer DaPolito was among many people who gave me time on their calendars to teach me about Tanzania today, but she was especially generous, sharing with me articles and essays and suggesting numerous books.
As always, I want to thank the extraordinary team at Doubleday, Vintage, and Penguin Random House Audio, many of whom are now some of my closest friends in the world: Kristen Bearse, Jillian Briglia, Maria Carella, Alex Dos Santos, Todd Doughty, Maris Dyer, John Fontana, Kelly Gildea, Elena Hershey, Suzanne Herz, Judy Jacoby, Anna Kaufman, Ann Kingman, Beth Lamb, Lindsay Mandel, James Meader, Nora Reichard, Paige Smith, William Thomas, David Underwood, LuAnn Walther, Lauren Weber, and Lori Zook.
I am so grateful to my agents: Deborah Schneider, Jane Gelfman, Cathy Gleason, and Penelope Burns at Gelfman/Schneider ICM; to Brian Lipson at IPG; and to Miriam Feuerle and her associates at the Lyceum Agency. I can’t thank you all enough for the myriad times you have walked me in off the ledge.
And, of course, there is Jenny Jackson, my brilliant editor at Doubleday for nearly a decade and a half now, who is utterly unflappable. Her editorial instincts are always spot-on and she will always fall on her sword for her authors. （She is also, you will see soon, a hell of a novelist in her own right.） This is our ninth book together, and she made each one so much better than it would have been without her counsel.
Finally, as always, I bow before the wisdom and insights of my lovely bride, Victoria Blewer, and our daughter, the always amazing Grace Experience. Victoria has been reading my work since we were eighteen years old, sometimes critiquing meticulously three or four drafts of a book. Grace has been weighing in on my work since she was in high school—and bringing many of my characters to life as one of the best audiobook narrators in the business. She has also become my go-to reader on my stage plays, candidly telling me what’s working and what isn’t.