Do you ever get the feeling that forces unseen are messing with your life? Yeah, me too. And there's little doubt that those forces are driven by the greatest force in the universe — irony, right? Right?

So imagine my surprise when, some years ago, while I was researching a book on demons, I kept running across references to tricksters, and one trickster in particular, the trickster god Coyote. I thought, Here's a god whose main function seems to be acting as an agent of irony — the special prosecutor of Murphy's Law, if you will. And, I figured, if ever there was a time during which the god of irony seemed to be testing his powers that time would be now.

So, I set about getting to know Coyote, spending a lot of time in folklore libraries and a month or so living on the Crow reservation, talking to people who never seem to be able to conceal a smile when they mentioned Old Man Coyote. I came away not only feeling that Coyote was a viable presence in the world, but that he could carry a book with the same goofy elegance with which he'd brought civilization to the Plains Tribes (if only so he could mess with them). So, I wrote "Coyote Blue. I think once you get to know Coyote, you'll see that he's been messing with us all the while — he just forgot to write.

Sincerely, Christopher Moore

As a boy growing up in Montana, he was Samson Hunts Alone — until a deadly misunderstanding with the law forced him to flee the Crow reservation at age fifteen. Today he is Samuel Hunter, a successful Santa Barbara insurance salesman with a Mercedes, a condo, and a hollow, invented life. Then one day, shortly after his thirty-fifth birthday, destiny offers him the dangerous gift of love — in the exquisite form of Calliope Kincaid — and a curse in the unheralded appearance of an ancient Indian god by the name of Coyote. Coyote, the trickster, has arrived to transform tranquillity into chaos, to reawaken the mystical storyteller within Sam ... and to seriously screw up his existence in the process.