It would have been a very strange book, at least in the context of the Prey series. Silent Prey sends Lucas to New York, where he's out of his element. Beggarman Prey would have sent him down to Miami, which is about as opposite Minnesota as you can get, both in culture and climate, and still be in the United States [3].

The opening sequence remains the same: Bekker escapes from prison and vanishes. But instead of going to New York, he heads to Miami. He's a fugitive from the law, his scarred face is on every newspaper in the nation, and he has nowhere to go.

Enter the Beggarman, a southern-Florida based drug lord (or perhaps just a criminal underworld boss, but drug lord fits the setting stereotype better [4]). His nickname comes from his rise to power literally from the ghettos. He doesn't have old-money connections, or ties to any of the established power structures. He looks like a hobo, almost, and relates on a personal level to the people living on the streets. The displaced and homeless trust him in a way they would never trust someone from a respected family [5].

The Beggarman (somehow — this version never went past the first chapter) finds Bekker before the authorities do. Bekker is insane, but still a genius. The Beggarman wants to use that genius as a tool, as a resource. And Bekker, for all his intelligence, has nowhere else to turn.

And... that is about as far as the author could get with the plot. Lucas would go down there, but he'd have no authority or jurisdiction, so he'd be there... why? To observe? To help? That far out of his element, he'd be more of a hindrance than a help. The author knew Florida well enough to do it — he'd been a reporter in Miami for nearly a decade — but he just couldn't get the plot to work in his head. So after some more brainstorming, he took it in a wildly different direction. Miami was gone, the Beggarman was gone. Everything changed [6].

For the vast majority of the writing, it wasn't spiders. It was butterflies. He had his butterfly collection (remember: eyelids) suspended from fishing line like some kind of macabre mobile. That works fine too. Or it would have worked, if the movie Silence of the Lambs hadn't come out just a few months before he started writing the book.

While Bekker is a very distinct psychopath from Hannibal Lecter, they share more than a few characteristics. The "butterflies" reference was a bit too close, it was felt, to the moths in Silence of the Lambs. And so the author changed it to spiders at very nearly the last minute..

In the original US hardcover, the Bekker's trial took twenty-one days. It's a huge, sensational trial, with all sorts of expert testimony and witnesses from all over. Lots of psychologists for the defense, trying to establish an insanity defense. Lots of stuff that was cut from the book because it got in the way of the action [9].

The author decided to cut the length of the trial from twenty-one days — long, but you do get trials that drag on forever — to a more reasonable ten days. That makes sense given Bekker: he's relatively well-off and well-respected in his profession (provisionally), but he's not a mega-celebrity [10], and there's not much doubt about the sequence of events. So not an amazingly short trial, but not a really long one either. Ten days.

But he missed the earliest reference to the length of the trial, just three pages earlier. On page 8, the trial lasts for twenty-one days, the original length. On page 11, it's ten days.

And the important bit is that this kind of mistake happens all the time. When you're writing, you only see a small bit at a time. You don't see the full picture. You're working on tiny pieces, individually, for a span of months or years. Worse, you've written all of it, so you know, deep down, that the words are right. Somehow.

But the readers, seeing differing descriptions of the same event in the span of three pages get those references thrown at them just a few minutes apart. It makes it look like the author's an idiot. How could they possibly mess up in such a short space?

Well, they do, and I'll bet that the first draft of the trial chapter, and the revision of the trial length to ten days, happened months apart. He didn't see it because he wasn't reading the book like a reader; he was editing it like a writer [11].

This was a somewhat embarrassing error, but it wasn't the last. And it certainly wasn't the worst [12].

This isn't anyone's fault per se, but it's a truth that anyone in a corporation is aware of. Nobody knows everything, information is compartmentalized, and sometimes errors happen because of that. Without perfect oversight — which is impossible — you're going to have things falling into the cracks of the system. One of these cracks tends to be between the writer and the cover artist [13].

Again, this is changing. People self-publishing on the internet will frequently do their own covers, or commission them personally [14]. The idea that an author has nothing whatsoever to do with the cover is an alien thought, like there's no way that could possibly happen in a just universe. Well, it does happen. The author doesn't have much say over the cover design. The author usually doesn't even have any input on the title [15].

This book, Silent Prey takes place in New York, in the middle of a brutal summer. That places it in August or so. But the US hardcover features a newspaper that very clearly is dated October 12, 1991.

This is a minor detail, but I have received complaints about it, saying that the author an idiot for getting it wrong. Seriously.

The message I get from this is not the one the letter writer intends. Their intent is to say "The author is an idiot for messing this up," but all I hear is "I am an idiot who doesn't understand anything about how books are made."

I find this upsetting. I really do. The author is human, and he makes mistakes, and some of the mistakes end up in the books. He owns those mistakes, and it's fine to call him out on it [16]. But if you spew three pages of vitriol on something over which the author has no control, it says more about you than about the quality of the book.

Or something like that [17].