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Miranda Corbie

Miranda’s Back!

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Book Cover to CITY OF SECRETSToday is the day!

CITY OF SECRETS is now on sale.

This long-awaited sequel to CITY OF DRAGONS is a deeply felt, personal book, and it deals with themes that have haunted me for a long time. Themes of man’s inhumanity to man, themes that  unfortunately still exist and are as relevant today as they were more than seventy years ago.

Miranda Corbie—my hardboiled, broken idealist of a protagonist—is hired by a surprise client to investigate the murder of Pandora Blake, a girl she barely knew but who, like all the girls who worked Treasure Island’s Gayway in flesh shows, was a soul she’d sworn to protect.

Pandora was a girl with stars in her eyes, dreaming of her name on a Hollywood Marquee. Like many pretty girls—in 1940 and 2011—those dreams crashed against reality. She found herself working as a nude model at the World’s Fair, object of desire for the daily stream of men who paid 25 cents a piece to snap her photo.

On May 25th, opening day of the 1940 World’s Fair, she’s found nude on the stage she worked on, stabbed to death … a filthy, anti-Semitic epithet scrawled in blood on her white skin.

CITY OF SECRETS exposes American anti-Semitism on many levels, from a domestic terror group that plotted to kill Jews in New York to the clubs and housing developments that denied them entry in San Francisco. It, and all other forms of racism, sexism, homophobia and intolerance, are the supreme tragedy of human existence.

I hope you find the story fast-paced and thrilling, of course, that you keep turning the pages and step side-by-side with Miranda on her harrowing journey through a familiar yet unfamiliar City by the Bay. But I also hope CITY OF SECRETS helps you renew your commitment to a future where anti-Semitism and bigotry are truly relics of the distant past.

As always, thanks for reading — and your support!

The Intimate Paperback

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Today is a red-letter day for me … and Miranda Corbie! 😉

Miranda’s out in paperback for the first time, in a beautiful trade edition of CITY OF DRAGONS. This isn’t actually her debut in paperback—that came with the mass market paperback of FIRST THRILLS—but it is her first solo gig in softcover.

I love paperbacks. They’re informal, more intimate that a hardcover  … though of course I love hardbacks, too. They’re parental and solid, reassuring and stable. They’re the books you can depend on and reach for, time and again.

But paperbacks … well, paperbacks are kind of sexy.

They are, after all, the books you take to bed, covers bent backwards, with dog-eared pages and the spine weathered and lined. They accompany you to the beach, on planes, on vacations to sunnier climes, sporting water rings from the Mojito you just finished.

Paperbacks are a summer fling, a quick tryst in the ski lodge, a book to be devoured in a burst of passion.

Alas, comes the time for fall or spring cleaning, and many a paperback—torn, tattered, scarred and bent out of shape, old beyond its years—is sent off packing to Goodwill or a garage sale, banished from the vacation places it used to call home.

Of course, some readers actually save their paperbacks (bless you!), collect them, and keep them looking beautiful. I’ve always adored paperback cover art from the past—from lurid, sensationalistic covers to  Deco beauties to the famous Dell “Map Backs”—and add to my collection when money and opportunity permits.

I certainly hope the CITY OF DRAGONS trade paperback brings Miranda new admirers … whether they read it on a beach in a last hurrah for summer or take it on a plane trip or peruse it at home in a comfortable chair. The cover stock is nubby and textured, colors vibrant and warm, size pleasantly holdable … altogether, it looks like much more than a fling. 😉