The cover image depicts the first scene in the book, where an armored car carrying diamonds in Washington DC is robbed by someone who picks it up with a magnet on a crane and drops it into the Potomac. I told them we would not find a stock photograph of the Washington skyline that would do the trick for us, as the author wanted the cover to depict the actual location of the heist that he describes in the novel (it wasn't right in front of the Lincoln Memorial, but up past Georgetown on Canal Street). The only option was for me to go to DC and shoot the location myself. Then I could add the other elements in with Photoshop.

I arrived to discover that it was impossible to take a photo of the actual location of the (fictional) heist from across the Potomac River, much less have the Washington skyline in the shot. I decided to do whatever I had to find a decent location to take a photo that did have the skyline in it, and just show the heist somewhere in the photo. I got lucky when I found the Netherlands Carillon, right next door to the Iwo Jima Memorial, was open to the public. The Netherlands Carillon is a bell tower of several stories, and a great place to take a photo of Washington DC.

The other elements included the face of the protagonist, a man the author deliberately created to be a Wilford Brimley lookalike. The author was in fact friends with Brimley, and he agreed to send photographs of himself in the requested pose for me to add to the cover. After that I added the crane, barge and armored car, all from digital pictures I took.

The most difficult part of creating the image was to make it look like very early in the morning on a cold December day, which is when the first scene of the book takes place. The skyline and Brimley photos were both taken late in the evening in the summer, when the sun was throwing high-contrast shadows.

Dead Again was to be the sequel to The Eagle Heist. This cover, however, was not used when the book was finally printed, as the author switched publishers.

For the first time neither the publisher nor the author had a clear idea of what to do for the cover. All they could tell me was that they thought there should be something looking like a ghost on the cover, since the story was about a murder investigation that the victim's ghost plays an active role in. But they didn't want the ghost to necessarily look sinister-- and definitely not cheesy.

I thought it would look unusual to do the cover "CSI"-style, with the body outline on the pavement in the alley (the ghost rising out of it) and the crime scene photographer taking a picture of it all, as seen through the 35mm film. Again I was trying for something that had a cinematic look, although at the same time I didn't want to do anything that would remind someone of the Kenneth Branagh-Emma Thompson movie. Thus the "ghosting" effect on the typography.

The plug was pulled on the project before I could make the final changes, which would have been to change the image of the ghost from the "floating" straight-body pose to one where the ghost appeared to be "climbing" out of the body outline, one foot outside the outline, knee bent, the other leg descending into a "hole".

Vow Of Vengeance was a real happy accident of timing. The book is about a modern-day pirate who is descended from Blackbeard, who goes on a rampage that takes him to all of Blackbeard's old haunts. When I was approached about the project late in 2002, I was only a couple of weeks away from a vacation to Ocracoke Island, one of North Carolina's Outer Banks and a major setting in the novel.

The author wanted the cover to depict the major scene at the end of the book, where the pirate attacks a hotel near Hampton Virginia- a hotel that really exists. Again, suitable photos of the hotel were not available, certainly none that were taken from the water at night, but this time a trip to do location photos wasn't in the budget. I used a local resort as a stand-in, digitally doubling it in size so it wouldn't be so recognizable. The speedboat (which in reality was only a pleasure boat about half the length I show it to be) and the water were photographed on my vacation. The underwater flag of Blackbeard was entirely computer-generated. This is the first book cover I did where none of the elements used in the design are real, unmanipulated photos.

Once more I went for the cinematic look with the typography, and for this one I went back to a technique of custom-modifying and distorting the font that I had used for the Soundscape CD song titles in 1998. You can see those under the CD PACKAGING link on the left.

On My Father's Grave was a last-minute job that the publisher had been trying to do himself, but got stuck on. He asked me to put together the two elements, the violin and rose, so that he could add them to the plain white background with the title and author text. I told him to let me put the whole thing together, it'd save both of us a bunch of trouble.

So he brought me a photograph of a violin that the author had taken, and a rose. I used my digital camera to photograph the rose, then cut it out in Photoshop so I could "lay" it on the strings of the violin. The violin itself had to be worked on because the flash had blown out most of the wood grain, as well as the bevelling, of the top half of the violin's body. I was very happy he asked me to do it, it was fun to make it look like the rose and violin are really on top of each other by using different depths of shadows underneath them. Note the water droplets under the end of the stem, and how one petal has fallen of the rose (it really did).

The Judas Bird was the first novel by Wake Forest University professor David Evans. The island of Roatán itself, off the coast of Honduras, is the major player in the story, which was why he wanted an old-fashioned map on parchment paper as the cover.

After a number of rounds of pairing down and removing elements the author had originally wanted on the cover, this final design was arrived at. A map of Roatán Island was faded out in the background, so that the coin (called a cob) is the major, front-and-center element. The coin in the first mock-ups was a downloaded graphic from the web; the one used in the final design came from a hand drawing of a specific coin by the author himself. I digitized his drawing and used Photoshop to create the metallic shine, texture and lighting effect.

The parchment itself came from layering three or four different kinds of paper I bought at a paper store, most of which were parchment, but one was actually a sheet of handmade paper with pieces of leaves and plant matter embedded in it. That's where the big ripples you can see in the texture come from. You can also see a slight faded line running vertically that separates the spine on the left from the cover on the right. This line is repeated where the "parchment" wraps around the book to include the back cover and flaps. They wound up looking like the book jacket was actually pre-worn where it was folded around the book- it was a complete, happy accident resulting from the way I put the different panels of the design together in Photoshop.