A Letter from Jo Perry
When the editor-in-chief of Mysterious Press asked me to write something to accompany a letter Thomas wrote to you, I found myself in a jam. What could I say when our family’s grief is so fresh and when Thomas was so well-known?
Then I remembered that love doesn’t die—ours for him and his for us—especially when love is deep and long—and that each love is its own story.
Thomas and I fell in love and married forty-five years ago.
He died a few weeks before we planned to celebrate the forty-sixth anniversary of our first date with dinner at a favorite old restaurant in Hollywood.
Our marriage was happy, but like Jane Whitefield, I struggled with infertility—and this is where my resemblance to Jane begins and ends.
Eventually Thomas and I shared the joy of being parents.
That he missed the happiness of being a grandfather to his beautiful grandson—one week old as I write this—is heartbreaking.
I know that he would have dedicated this book to him.
Thomas was a compassionate and brilliant father and husband.
But the private, interior process that is writing was the center of his life, perhaps because writing the way he did required that he use all gifts at once—intelligence, modesty, honesty courage, cleverness, humor, compassion, inventiveness, curiosity and clarity.
Through the years he created fictional people so real and interesting that they became part of our family—and perhaps part of your family, too—and changed the way we saw and experienced the world: The Butcher’s Boy, Eddie, and Elizabeth Waring; Joe Carver and Kapak; Jack Till; Justine Poole; Chinese Gordon and Dr. Henry Metzger; Jane Whitefield, the specter Harry, Cary, her terrifying enemies, and the desperate people whose lives she transformed and freed—and all other indelible characters with whom Thomas populated his stories.
Thomas enjoyed real people, too. One of the pleasures of writing for him was getting to know his readers in person and through correspondence. Many became friends. So, it feels right that his letter to you concludes A Tree of Light and Flowers.
Now that Thomas is gone, if you expected me to reveal something shocking or scandalous about him, I must disappoint you.
He was never a hit man, a thief, a mobster or a criminal; he was a good man.
And you know everything about him that matters already: The sound of his voice on page, the way he thought, the things he hated and those he loved are in his books, especially in the books about Jane Whitefield whom he admired and cared about so much.
I hope you feel his presence in the book you are about to read. He lives in his pages now.
Jo Perry
November 2, 2025