Welcome to Fresh Fiction, Boston. Please tell us about yourself and a little about your new book, TWO BOYS AT BREAKWATER.   A writer should never tell you a little about their own book. It might tend to sound too much like a waiter reading off to you the night’s specials. Set against the backdrop of New York in the 1950s and 60s, TWO BOYS AT BREAKWATER is about two young men growing up and learning about who they truly are, and the love they find in each other. Where did the idea for this novel originate?   I collect incidents. I listen and I watch. And what I sense will take me somewhere else I write down. I sat at my desk for a generation And watching the Bronx rain one night I recalled A moment in a drinking dive not unlike The one Gary Snyder wrote about in I Went into the Maverick Bar That too was on a rainy night Coming down hard on a tin roof. Above the room  Where a pool table reigned supreme. And where two rough type western drunks Shot eight ball and the breeze. “This is gonna come across as strange,” one said. “But…

You’ve had it, just as I have–that delicious moment when you read something that shatters you.  “I didn’t know you could do that with words,” you think, your relationship with literature forever changed. There’s a great scene in The NeverEnding Story when the bookseller tells Bastian how certain stories aren’t safe, that they won’t simply release you on your own terms. Here are five pieces that still haven’t let me go, and that’ve shaped my life as a writer of crime fiction. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates I was in 9th grade when our English teacher assigned this out of our thumping short story anthology. Oates begins her tale in the most unassuming way: Connie–fifteen, and with all the drama that entails–decides to stay home while her parents and sister go to a most uncool family barbeque. Sometime into the afternoon, two men show up in a convertible and honk the horn. Connie goes out to see what they want, and the terror begins to unspool. This story was a revelation. The idea that the most hideous things could happen in the middle of a blue day, and right where you lived, cut…

Master storyteller Vito Zuppardo lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Born and raised in New Orleans, he knows the best places in the city and writes about them all. In his Voodoo Lucy series of books, he combines the intrigue of the historic French Quarter, New Orleans voodoo practices, Creole cuisine, and unique architectural styles. The characters in this series are multifaceted, intelligent, charming, daring, and outrageous. They provide interesting backdrops to settings of stories about murders, gangs, drugs, shady politics, along with fascinating relationships. The interactions between criminals, law enforcement officials, residents, and those who work and play in New Orleans offer a rich, captivating look at this distinct city. Here are quotes from the three books that describe the people, places, and stories that will keep readers engaged and wanting to know more about Voodoo Lucy. Tupelo Gypsy, book 1, June 2018 The French Quarter never slept. Jazz music wafted out of clubs until the first sign of morning, to be replaced by the much less agreeable clanks and screeches of a garbage truck picking up trash in the alleyway that separated Bourbon and Royal. Her real name was Lucinda Jones, and most recently, she was known as Voodoo…

Reviewers often refer to my protagonist, Hallie Ahern, as both “feisty,” and “troubled,” as if this combination is something of a surprise. But to me, these traits go hand in hand. Hallie is an investigative journalist, a recovering gambling addict who has to struggle with herself to stay away from the online poker sites. But because she isn’t really addressing her addiction, she still craves the action of a hot table. To get her adrenaline fix, she pushes whatever investigation she’s working on farther than it should go. In Teaser, Hallie discovers that local teenage girls are featuring provocative videos of themselves on the local social networking site. Hallie discovers this is more dangerous and far reaching than just a teenage whim. When teenage girls start disappearing, Hallie’s story becomes a mission. Although I’ve never been addicted to anything –except maybe FreeCell– I’ve had a lot of experience with the addictive personality. People I’ve loved have had to come back from the precipice, and I’ve suffered along on their journey. But I’ve also been fortunate enough to learn that when in recovery, the same personality trait that drives these loved ones to their addictions, also drives them to success. A…

Are you one of those people who tend to crack a joke when you’re in trouble? Is it because fear brings out the urge to laugh, or is it that laughter helps us get though the worst of times? And maybe it depends on who’s in it with you. Like a good buddy you can count on to watch your back. Our heroine, Brooklyn sex therapist Saylor Oz, and her sidekick, Benita Morales, are buddies who race through crime adventures bickering and bantering, sometimes blaming, and always forgiving. Kind of like our marriage. Being a husband-wife team writing under one pseudonym, we sometimes feel like we’re living a reality TV buddy movie. Aside from combining our opposite qualities — a guy who loves boxing and a woman who loves perfume — we use the roller coaster dynamics of a relationship between two strong-willed people to help shape the fun and exciting relationship of our characters. Not that we’ve ever been given a deadly ultimatum by a hit man called “The Monster.” Or that we’d go poking into dangerous situations. Like Saylor does, only to find herself knee-deep in trouble against some slimy, nasty dudes. But we love combining a gritty,…

It’s an odd way to make a living when you think about it. We write about things that would terrify and dismay people if they were real. Murder. Serial killers. Violence. And we do all this to entertain people. I think about this issue whenever a news show covers an intimate tragedy like the disappearance of Natalee Holloway in Aruba or Madeleine McCann in Portugal. Cable news shows play on our love of mystery and drama to boost ratings. The difference is that, unlike a novel, the crime is real. Our news programs treat these dramas as whodunits, to an extent that we often cheapen or even forget the actual tragedy. The question is: Are those of us who write mysteries any different? We invent our stories, but we strive to make the fear, crime, and drama real for the reader. The best writers make us gasp and cry, afraid to turn the page, but unable to put the book down. My only explanation is that mysteries make us confront difficult moral choices and decide for ourselves. Mysteries also give us something that the real world often cannot. Order. Resolution. Truth. The frustration in watching the news is in not…

Nemo came into our lives the way the best ideas for novels often do. One morning my husband and I had no dog. We had memories of two who had aged and died, dogs we had loved for years and mourned with a startling intensity. We also had vows that we would not get another pet while our lives were so busy. Then we got the phone call.“Mom,” our oldest son, the lawyer and country gentleman began, “we found a puppy dying in the grass off our road. Jim–” their neighbor, “nearly ran him over with a bush hog. If I hadn’t stopped to talk to him, and he hadn’t turned off the tractor. . .” We didn’t need a dog. “What kind of puppy?” I asked, because like any mom I wanted to keep the conversation going. “Who knows. Spotted, starving and sick. I’m not sure he’ll make it.” He did make it, of course–or why would I tell this story? My son and daughter-in-law carefully nursed the foundling back to health. Then puppy came to visit one afternoon and simply never left. I couldn’t bring myself to name him for days, not until my husband returned home from…