It was during a thunder storm at the Pelican Inn, Muir Beach, California when over dinner Peter suggested the old English inn would be a great setting for a mystery novel. Wasn’t it at a similar inn on a dark and stormy night two hundred years ago that Lord Byron suggested to his friends Percy and Mary that they write ghost stories? And didn’t Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley then write her masterpiece, Frankenstein? "Good idea," said Bill. Why don’t the three of us write one together?" Skip forward a few decades: Bill sent Peter and me this email: “When I reached age forty-five I could no longer write a sentence beginning with the word ‘strudel’"—James Joyce.  I responded, “Strudel was the last thing on my mind on a dark and stormy night when I arrived at the Pelican Inn.”  And Peter responded . . .  and we were off and running, many years, thousands of emails back and forth weaving together stories of a dark and stormy night at the Pelican Inn, Muir Beach. Jackie joined us. As our styles developed, so did the individual stories until eventually we had four separate novels.