The Mark on Eve, is a tale of a woman bewitched in Colonial America whose pirate lover’s ship went down off Cape Cod. Eve is alive today, her secret in tact, helping the female governor of California run for president until her act of saving the governor from an assassination attempt could reveal Eve’s secret and doom the presidential campaign. But the story did not come full-blown from my imagination. In fact the pirate ship and his waiting girlfriend were true – to a point.
The idea for my book came from an actual Cape Cod legend. In 1717, Marie Hallett, a 15 year-old young woman supposedly involved with the pirate Sam Bellamy was suspected of using witchcraft to draw Bellamy’s ship, the Whydah, toward shore in a storm. The ship sank in the violent storm drowning Bellamy and most of his pirate crew. The Whydah was discovered and salvaged in 1984. There is a museum dedicated to the find in Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod.
I simply took some of the persons in the legend and changed the story by asking: What if the woman was not a witch but was be-witched to live forever? It allowed me to explore how she would manage through different periods in American history all the while maintaining suspense in the modern day story in which she tries to keep her secret while giving meaning to her long existence by helping a female governor run for president of the United States.
While Marie Hallett was supposedly 15 years old, I wanted my leading lady to be older and more sophisticated as she made her way through the epochs of American history. Since the pirate ship went down in 1717, I made her 25 years old at the time. At 25-years-old at the time of the shipwreck means she would have been born in 1692, not coincidentally, the year of the Salem Witch Trials.
Title: The Mark on Eve
Genre: Suspense
Author: Joel Fox
Website: http://www.joelfox.com/
Publisher: Bronze Circle Books
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Joel Fox has spent over 30 years in California politics, serving on numerous state commissions, working on many ballot issue campaigns, and advising candidates. An adjunct professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University, Fox has authored hundreds of opinion pieces for numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal,Washington Post, USA Today and Los Angeles Times. Joel Fox is also the author of the Zane Rigby mystery series—Lincoln’s Hand and FDR’s Treasure— in which an FBI Special Agent must solve a puzzle from the past of an American president to solve modern day murders. A native of the Boston area, Joel Fox lives in Los Angeles.
The Story Behind the Book 