Month: July 2025

Famous Friends: Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn

By their own admission, Mortimer and Eugene, the two aspiring lawyers in Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, are lazy, disillusioned, and bored. Their dry humor and satirical outlook on life make them entertaining characters. By the end of the book, however, the friends inspire each other to become better men who make courageous choices. Read The Sister Knot about two resilient women, orphaned in WW2, who defy fate to sustain a lifelong friendship. A compelling novel about the power of sisterhood. Learn more about the book in NOVELS.

Two aspiring but lazy lawyers delight readers in Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

Two resilient women, two separate journeys, one lasting friendship

WHO CARES? Cover Reveal and Pre-Order Link

Tada! Here’s the cover for my next novel Who Cares? which is due out on 02 December 2025. The book is available for pre-order now. Who Cares? is about the struggle for dignity at Woodruff Home for the Aged, “a lively place where old people go to die.” Read more about the book and its unforgettable cast of characters on the order page and on the NOVELS page of this website. Start your holiday shopping early. Enjoy and thanks for the fandom!

Welcome to Woodruff Home for Aged, a lively place where old people go to die

What I’m Reading: Tell Me Everything

My Goodreads and Amazon reviews of Tell Me Everything: A Novel by Elizabeth Strout (Rated 5) – Tell Me More. Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout brings together the characters she’s introduced readers to in her previous novels. In this volume, Bob Burgess is the center who draws the others into his orbit, but each has untold stories of their own to relate. Individually, these “unrecorded lives” have often been challenging, even painful, yet they are not extraordinary within the panoply of human experience. Likewise, the events and emotions they share when their lives are entangled in Strout’s latest book are unexceptionable. Except that in this author’s capable hands, each story acquires the depth, radiance, or tragedy that elevates it to a level worth telling and remembering. As a novelist myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admire Strout’s gentle but firm control as she navigates the bumpy terrain her characters traverse. Their small worlds are big enough to accommodate us all. I didn’t want the book to end, and impatiently await Strout’s next book so she can tell me more.

Stories worth listening to, told by a masterful writer

Why writers read: “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” – W. Somerset Maugham

Famous Friends: Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls

The two rap artists started as friends who admired each other’s work, Tupac on the West Coast and Biggie on the East. The friendship changed to rivalry when Tupac suspected Biggie of having him robbed and shot outside a recording studio. Tupac died in September 1996, six days after being gunned down; Biggie was shot and killed six months later. Hip hop is still reverberating. Read The Sister Knot about two resilient women, orphaned in WW2, who defy fate to sustain a lifelong friendship. A compelling novel about the power of sisterhood. Learn more about the book in NOVELS.

A friendly rivalry turned deadly

Two resilient women, two separate journeys, one lasting friendship

A Non-Political July 4th Association

In 1777, Gun Hill Road in the Bronx, where I later grew up, was the site where American colonists used a cannon to defeat the British in the Revolutionary War. In elementary school in the 1950s, students at P.S. 94 learned history by writing essays about the war hero after whom our street was named. (Putnam Place, my street, honored General Israel Putnam, popularly known as “Old Put.”) The 3.5-mile road features prominently in my latest book, which begins in 1946, as the site of drag races and gang wars in a working class immigrant neighborhood. Learn more about this historic thoroughfare and its freedom-loving residents in The Sister Knot a novel about two resilient women, orphaned in WW2, who defy fate to sustain a lifelong friendship.

Cannon used in American Revolution

Two resilient women, two separate journeys, one lasting friendship