My new novel is available to order

The Curse of Pietro Houdini is forthcoming in January, 2024. I am extremely proud of it. For readers who know my work, Pietro has the depth of personality and character you loved from Sheldon Horowitz, Arwood Hobbes, and Irv Wylie. It has the depth of historical fiction in The Girl in Green and How to Find Your Way in the Dark. And it has expansive drama, philosophy, and intensity you find in all my novels. I have a new agent, a new publisher, and I want to see Pietro bring me to a wider audience. Order early to make the industry happy and please share the news.

Here's the summary:

Before the Americans bombed our abbey at Montecassino in 1944 — the same abbey founded by St. Benedict in AD 529 — I stole three paintings from the Nazis who were stealing them from the monks. I was fourteen years old. The story of how three Tiziano paintings from the Renaissance survived the war is therefore the story of how I survived; and the story of how I survived is the story of Pietro Houdini and his curse.

 So begins the story of Massimo’s war. Or rather, it begins in August 1943 when a man calling himself Pietro Houdini finds an orphaned child in the gutter of a road south of Rome. Pietro is on his way to the famous abbey of Montecassino where he will present himself to the abbot as having been sent to look after the monastery’s art in his capacity as Maestro di restauro e conservazione and confidant of the Vatican. The child – who says his name is Massimo – becomes his assistant. As Nazi officers come and go in the ancient buildings, and the turmoil in Italy grows, Massimo listens to Pietro talk while he supposedly restores the abbey’s ancient frescoes.

But can Massimo believe what Pietro is saying, particularly when Massimo has secrets too? Who is this extraordinary man really? And what are the two of them going to do when it becomes evident that Montecassino is about to become the front line in the war? In the months that follow, Pietro Houdini and Massimo gather friends for a bold escape: a dangerous nurse named Ada, the cafe owner and murderer Bella Bocci, a wounded but chipper German soldier called Harald, and the lovers Dino and Lucia (inseparable from their injured mule Ferrari). Together they will lie, cheat, steal, fight, kill, and sin their way through battlefields to survive, all while smuggling three Renaissance masterpieces and a bag full of ancient Greek gold they have rescued from being removed ‘for safe keeping’ by the Germans.

The Curse of Pietro Houdini is an adventure story, a coming of age epic, and an old-fashioned heist all united by the theme of transformations: of ideas, identities, expectations, assumptions, dreams and possibilities; a war novel set against one of the most enigmatic and morally complex fronts of World War II, where Germans become heroes, Allies become villains, and a child called Massimo has to learn what it means, finally, to become herself again.