Okay, I get it!  I surrender.  Many of you — all male, by the way — have written to tell me that I made a mistake in SMOKE SCREEN.  One can’t let the air out of tires simply by removing the cap on the valve stem.  I apologize.
I’m fallible.  I’m human.  I’m also a girl.  I know a great deal more about mascara and Spanx than I do about car stuff.  And, frankly, I’m really glad about that.

Between my computer and publication, the manuscript was read by numerous people, including gifted and knowledgeable copyeditors — one of them a man, BTW.  No one caught it.  I guess they’re human, too.  Who’d have thought?

I hope the other 397 pages of the book will make up for that one, that the story is so compelling that it compensates for the error.  The tone of most of your notes has been indulgent.  Some have been informative and instructive.  But one man wrote to say this is why he doesn’t read “books written by chicks.”  For some statements, like mistakes, one must consider the source and simply be tolerant.