Under Cover

Don’t judge a book by its cover. Are you kidding? Of course we judge a book by its cover. Not if it’s by a favorite author, perhaps, but when we’re browsing in a bookstore or even online for a novel by a new writer, we look for covers that appeal to us. So I’m delighted to show you the cover for A Fondness for Truth, the third Polizei Bern book, to be published on April 16, 2024.

The most exciting moment during the birth of a novel is seeing the final cover. That’s even more thrilling to me than holding the printed book for the first time. Although a book’s story is the most important thing about it, the production of the text is so time-consuming that by the time the finished book is in the author’s hands, there’s more relief than elation. At least, that’s how I feel.

There are many points of satisfaction during the long process of producing a book: starting the research, writing the first words, finishing the first draft, completing a later draft that is good enough to send to friends for their comments, emailing an umpteenth draft to the editorial director who’ll decide what changes it needs before it can be sent to production, receiving first the copyedited manuscript and then the initial set of page proofs . . . I could go on and on because, believe me, there’s even more that has to be done.

But the cover is different. I don’t create the cover—and thank goodness for that since I’m an appalling visual artist. I suggest to the designer the images I think would work well with the story and then wait for the cover to appear. I have not spent months and even years worrying about it as I have about the text. The cover arrives in my inbox out of the blue; I have to take a deep breath before I summon the courage to double-click on the file! Did the designer pay attention to my suggestions? Will the picture illustrate the story successfully? Will I like the way it looks?

In the case of the three Polizei Bern books, the covers I saw at that first double-click were works in progress. But they were beautiful. The bones of the final versions were easy to see in the original drafts, and the back-and-forth work I did with the designer to get them right was fascinating.

I hope the new cover of A Fondness for Truth makes you want to read the book. This time, Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatelli are investigating a deliberate hit-and-run that knocked a woman off her bicycle and killed her. Andi Eberhart, the victim, was in her early thirties; she and her woman partner Nisha, a first-generation Tamil immigrant from Sri Lanka, have a baby girl. Does Andi’s murder have something to do with the homophobic letters she had been receiving, with Nisha’s family’s objections to their partnership, or with something else entirely? Andi was a person who readily shouldered responsibility and expected others to do the same. Perhaps at some point she expected too much of someone.