Hello everyone! I’ve been asked to write about the story behind the story, so here goes. First, please allow me a little background. Little Girl Gone is the second in the Claire Conover mysteries, and is the sequel to Little Lamb Lost. Claire is a child welfare social worker in Birmingham, Alabama. In Little Lamb…
I should say first that stories don’t come to me all at once. They arrive in fragments, over time. That is especially true of my latest novel, The Bronx Kill. I had the title first. A number of years back—ten or more—I was perusing a map of the Bronx, where I lived into my twenties,…
Several streams flowed into the river for Turning To Stone. Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah was influential for giving me a sociological portrait of the Camorra and Naples, although I’ve been to Naples. The Financial Crises of 2007 and 2008 also inspired me. While I’m not paranoid or susceptible to conspiracy theories, I never subscribed to the…
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…
Growl was inspired by three things I love in this world: my mother, cats, and Native American culture. I love animals, and there has been a furry feline in my life ever since I can recall. In fact, the white housecat in Growl, Tinker, is named in honor of my first pet. All of my…
At its heart, Jesus Jackson is the story of a 14 year-old atheist, learning how to handle the grief he feels after his brother’s death, without having any specific religious faith to guide him. As someone who gave up on religion at a young age, this basic situation–coping with pain and hardship in the absence of faith–is…
My experience and my fascination with mental powers fueled the writing of my characters in my paranormal suspense novel, A Hidden Element. Several characters have mind powers: telekinesis, mind control, healing. All have different perspectives on using them: one to feel all-powerful, one to sacrifice and help others, one to find belonging, one to save…
The project started while taking a local fiction writing course taught by an outstanding novelist and previous short story editor of “The New Yorker,” Hollis Alpert. One of several topics for a short story was “A Silver Box.” Perhaps because my father’s entire Lithuanian family had been murdered by the Nazis, I wrote the story…
In July, 1992, when I was in Milan, I saw a poster of two men in friendly consultation. The slogan beneath the portrait said: “Non li avete uccisi, le loro idee camminano sulle nostre gambe!” “You did not kill them: their ideas walk on our legs.” Those two men were Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino,…
It began with a dream. In that half-nightmare, I was a young male professor, fired from his teaching position for having seduced the daughter of the Chairman of the Board of Trustees. I felt compelled to record this remarkable dream as a short story, which grew to 50 pages before I realized it had become…
The Story Behind the Book 