New Book!
Thrilled to announce my new book
A Murder on Jane Street
Here’s a little intel on the road that led me to Jane Street!
The grandpa I idolized in childhood was a detective lieutenant so maybe detecting is in my blood… any astrologer worth her salt would tell you my loaded 12th House makes me a sleuth from the get-go (probably why I love research). And maybe most catalytic of all, I had a distant great aunt who, I think, was a Spy in WWII!
Truth is, I’ve been longing to bring the Donovan family detectives to life for quite a while, so when the tale of A Murder on Jane Street began to percolate in my brain, it gave me the chance I’d been waiting for.
Why Greenwich Village?
I lived in Greenwich Village for a time when I was a teen and I fell in love with it. The quirky streets and the quirkier characters. The Bohemian free-form attitude toward life, the hootenannies on Sunday afternoons at Washington Arch, where the famous, the infamous and the anonymous come together to play music or just sing their hearts out. The Village was a place for Flower Children, protesters, free spirits and local families, all reveling in the freedoms the Village provided. All bursting with hope, sexuality and a sense we could save a world that seriously needed saving.
I loved the treelined crooked streets, the cobblestones, the handsome old brownstones with their tiny gardens, lace curtained windows and dignified sense of history. The Bagel Café on Cornelia Street offered sustenance for the spirit, not just great all-day breakfasts… the artists – now worth millions in museums and galleries – were selling their paintings on the streets for food or lodging back in the day. Absolutely everything about The Village spoke to my heart and soul. I always wanted to go back and live there, but fate kept me on the Upper East Side, so maybe the Donovan homestead on Jane Street is sheer wish fulfillment for me.
My Heroes
The Donovan family and their quirky and remarkable friends in A Murder on Jane Street, remind me of bits and pieces of people I’ve actually known and loved, so I’m hoping you, my dear readers, will love them, too. The Donovans are a throwback to a time when family members lived with or near each other, so generations could tumble all over each other and every possible point of view could be hashed out at the Sunday dinner table.
As always happens for me, my characters in this story evolved according to their own whims, as I wrote. This magical evolution where the characters take on a life of their own, then take my hand and lead me places I didn’t expect to go, is one of my favorite parts of storytelling for a living.
Who’s Who?
In A Murder on Jane Street, you’ll meet Fitz, the retired and admired NYC Police Chief – loveable, stalwart, living within the dual parameters of a code of honor and a really big heart.
Maeve, his eldest daughter is an astrologer-psychic-romantic, who’s been deeply wounded in love and is now unwilling to be hurt again. She’s also a partner in a Bleecker Street Tea Shop where her Irish mystic recipes are becoming a hot ticket with Villagers and Uptowners alike.
Rory is Maeve’s feisty younger sister. A lawyer with an analytical, steel-trap mind, and a creative heart, she’s turned in her law firm creds to become a real estate entrepreneur, because she loves old houses and their possibilities for rehabbing and reinvention.
Finn, Maeve’s daughter, is a 22-year-old artist with a wicked sense of humor, a photographer’s visionary eye and a plucky desire to see, touch, feel, travel the world and immortalize all of it in images.
Raised on the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, all the Donovans are mystery buffs and detecting is firmly lodged in their DNA.
Inspiration
And then there’s the catalyst that inspired me to write this particular adventure tale, about 30 years after I first started thinking about it! I found an old letter in a file and the floodgates opened.
In the last few months of her life, an elderly, distant relative of mine – one with whom I’d carried on a decades-long friendship by letter – cryptically revealed to me a totally unsuspected secret past. She – who was the picture of propriety – had been, it seems, a spy in WWII! A spy who’d been living the life of an ex-pat ever since the war ended in order to stay alive.
She was worried she said, that someone dangerous from her past had found her after all these decades and intended to kill her. When she died mysteriously a short time after, no one paid the slightest attention to the fear in her last letter to me. She was very old and everyone but me thought her mind had been playing tricks on her. Being a novelist in training, however, I believed she’d told me the truth. So I tucked away the notion of what it would be like to carry a dangerous secret for a lifetime.
As my secretive Auntie never revealed whatever secrets she possessed, I was free to invent my own, so now thirty years later, my imagined secret has grown to be A Murder on Jane Street.
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I too, had a great aunt who was a spy in the resistance in France during WW 11 – I met her once or twice in Paris when I was 18. Her name was Henrietta. She gave me an old heavy metal key I kept for many years. 🙏Leora