1940

Today 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!