We are neighbors in history, so to speak, though hardly neighbors of current geography. I descend from the Percys of Northumberland, and Alnwick Castle, a map will show, is not too far from Bamburgh Castle, home to some of your antecedents. I have just in the past month begun to read your Saxon series. I began with “The Lords of the North” and have now backtracked to the first book in this series, with plans to read books two and four. All are under my roof. I was delighted to visit your website last night to learn that you have written a fifth book in the Saxon Stories, to be released next month. I did not grow up in California with any knowledge of my British ancestry–rather the focus in Kern County schools was on the numerous native tribes in the state, the Spanish Padre Junipero Serra, and the string of Spanish missions. It is only since 2003 that I, a former print reporter and in my 50s, began to slowly piece together our family’s story. The Loomises, from Braintree, Essex, East Anglia, arrived in ancient Windsor, Connecticut, in 1638. The elite prep/boarding school, Loomis Chaffee, today sits on the ancestral Loomis homestead; there is a blurb on the school’s website about emigrants Joseph and Mary White Loomis who came to these shores with eight children. I have learned during the last handful of years that through my paternal great-grandmother, I am descended from four prominent Puritan pastors of New England: John Wilson, John Wilson Jr., Thomas Hooker, and Grindal Rawson. Elizabeth Mansfield Wilson, wife of John Wilson, who served as first pastor of Boston’s First Church, is of Plantagenet descent (the Eure line in Douglas Richardson’s recent genealogy tome about the Plantagenets). I picked up your Saxon series because you write of my very distant great-grandfather, Alfred the Great of Wessex. Your books in this series are fun, well written, and provide pleasant hours of entertainment. The vivid historical fiction you create puts some flesh on history. I hope to visit England for the first time, I hope in 2011. Thank you for your marvelous efforts. Linda Loomis San Antonio, Texas