Maxime Bertrand is Liz Ryerson’s sidekick. He is a retired classics professor, originally from Montreal, who is lovingly based on an old friend of mine who I miss very much. He was a retired English professor and my doctoral dissertation supervisor. People who knew Sheldon Zitner might recognize him a bit in Maxime—although Maxime is much less acerbic than my friend, who was a New Yorker and had a very wry sense of humour… It’s not so much him as a character, but it’s the relationship that Maxime has with Liz. They have an almost father/daughter relationship.

One of the things that happens when you write fiction is you get to fill in missing pieces of your own life. I love my neighbourhood, but we don’t have a bookstore. So I made my protagonist, Liz Ryerson, own the store that I wish existed in my neighbourhood… I also made her dog a cross between a border collie and a lab—other than that, he has all the qualities of my own little dog Toby, who’s small and can’t fetch a Frisbee. So I decided if I was going to give myself a bookstore I was also going to give my dog the body he wanted so he could catch a Frisbee.