Latchkeys: Roscoes in the Night will be available next week after a slight delay. But right now, author James Reasoner writes about a good cover.

Writing historical fiction is always a challenge. And a story like “Roscoes in the Night”, despite incorporating the fantasy elements of the Latchkeys series, is definitely historical fiction, set in a time and place that actually existed.

Because of that, there are all sorts of details that have to be gotten right, or at least close enough to right that they’re not jarringly out of place. If you’re writing a story set in the Old West, you can’t have a character pull out a smart phone and look something up on Google. (Well, you could . . . but then it would be a whole different kind of story.)

Not only do you have to worry about historical accuracy, you have to be concerned with capturing the feel of the time period as well. The reader has to think, if only for the time it takes to read the story, “That must have been what it was like in the Roaring Twenties.”

A good cover artist can be of immense help in creating this impression, and that’s where Vance Kelly comes in.  His covers for the Latchkeys series include all different sorts of scenes, but what they have in common is that you look at them and immediately get a sense of what the story is about, not only its plot but also its tone and background. The creators of Latchkeys couldn’t have asked for a finer artist to bring their vision to life.

So enjoy that beautiful cover and then check out the words as well. I think they’re pretty good.