Portland, Maine, from the Portland Observatory

Writing teachers tell you to write what you know. I write what I want to know. And I didn't know much about Portland, except that it had been burned a lot…by the Indians in 1675, by the British in 1775, and by accident in 1866, when July 4th fireworks got out of hand.

I started at the Observatory, an 86-foot tower atop Munjoy Hill. In the old days, merchants climbed ito watch for ships. Today, people climb it for the view: Casco Bay to the east, the White Mountains to the west, and Congress Street to the south, the epicenter of a vibrant little city filled with great restaurants, fine museums, and fabulous bookstores.

Peter Fallon is always getting into more trouble than an antiquarian bookseller should, and he gets into plenty in one of those bookstores. Later, he finds himself trapped at the top of the Observatory, ready to run for his life.

"'This burg's had more rebirths than a Hindu headed for the last level of enlightenment,' said Peter. 'It's burned down and been rebuilt four or five times. And look at it now. Jumpin' even at lunchtime.'"

The Stanley Woolen Mill on the Blackstone River, Uxbridge, Massachusetts

The story of New England is the story of the sea. But rivers tell the tale, too. The Blackstone rises near Worcester and flows just 46 miles to salt water at the tip of Narragansett Bay, dropping some 438 feet along the way. You could call it the birth canal of the Industrial Raevolution. The nation's first spinning mill opened at the Blackstone's mouth in 1793; soon dozens flourished along its banks.

The Stanley Woolen Mill made uniforms during the Civil War and through both world wars, too. Locals say when the looms were running at full capacity, the whole building shook. But all industries have life cycles, and the Stanley looms stopped spinning in 1988.

This place became my inspiration for the fictional Pike-Perkins Mill, where a family's fortune rises and falls with the New England textile economy. In real life, the now-abandoned spot is being born again, as housing, retail, and office space. And so the river's tale rolls on.

"And out in the countryside, where corn grew green in spring and ripened in August and stubbled the fields come fall, farmers would stop to wipe their brows. And they would hear, beneath the rustle of the wind, a sound no New Englander had ever heard in the quiet before the nineteenth century, the distant rumble of a mighty mill turning…turning…"