Tag Archives: New York City

Two thrillers and a mystery

Posted on May 14, 2025 | 1 comment

This month I’m primarily focused on trying to publish the nonfiction book I’ve been working on for the last few years.  It tells the story of my fight for reproductive rights when I was a young lawyer in Chicago.  It will be a terrific book.  But I need to find a publisher.

While I pursue this goal, I’ve decided to devote this post to describing my three novels, all stories blending “the law” with protagonists who find themselves in perilous settings but somehow manage to survive.

Please forgive my shameless plug, but I honestly think you’ll enjoy reading about my novels.

My first published novel, A Quicker Blood, takes its title from an Emily Dickinson poem about “escape.”  Dickinson wrote “I never hear the word ‘escape’ without a quicker blood.”  You’re right to conclude that the theme of this thriller is “escape.”

The protagonist, Karen B. Clark, is a young lawyer living in New York City three years after getting her law degree.  She’s already weary of life in NYC, disillusioned with her job on Wall Street, and fed up with her two-timing boyfriend.  (I named my protagonist Karen in honor of a good friend who worked on behalf of needy clients for many years before she died.  I’ve known many admirable women named Karen, and I think it’s deplorable to disparage women using the name Karen for no good reason.)

Karen Clark impulsively takes off for a lawyers’ conference in Chicago, where she meets another young woman named Karen B. Clark.  Karen decides to call her “K.B.”   K.B. has just finished law school and is about begin her legal career in the small town of Walden, Wisconsin, where a law firm has hired her, sight unseen.

When both Karen and K.B. are injured in separate mishaps, Karen awakens in a hospital, where she’s been identified as K.B.  She spies a newspaper report of the death of an unidentified young woman and realizes that K.B. must be dead.

Karen decides to seize the moment and turn her life around.  She’ll escape her life in NYC, assume K.B.’s identity, and try life as a small-town lawyer.  Once in Walden, Karen relishes her new existence and begins a sizzling romance, but she soon uncovers terrible secrets that lead her to fear for her life.

A Quicker Blood has garnered many 5-star customer reviews on Amazon.com.  You might want to read a few of them!  Almost every reader has loved this book and asked me to write another one like it.  I think you’d also love learning how Karen finds her way to Walden and deals with the challenges of assuming someone else’s identity. You’ll probably like reading about the somewhat dubious characters she encounters there, how she finds herself plunged into a perilous situation, and how she cleverly manages to survive.

My second novel, Jealous Mistress, is not a thriller but an old-fashioned mystery like the ones Agatha Christie used to write.  A dead body appears on the first page, so you know that there’s a mystery to be solved.

It’s October 1981, and the Reagan administration has just declared that ketchup is a vegetable.  Alison Ross has chosen to set aside her demanding career as a lawyer so she can spend more time at home with her two young children.  She’d like to find a good part-time job, but because “the law is a jealous mistress,” her search for part-time work has gone nowhere.

Early one morning, Alison stumbles across a dead body at her daughter’s nursery school. (Preschools were still called nursery schools in 1981.)  Because Alison saw the school janitor make a hasty exit, she reluctantly becomes emmeshed in the police investigation.  When the police charge the janitor with murder, Allison has doubts about his guilt and decides to find out what really happened.

Pursuing the real killer while she juggles life at home with her husband and kids, Alison uncovers a host of shocking secrets in the quiet suburb of East Winnette.

Lots of readers have written 5-star customer reviews for this novel, too. It presents issues that many of us have dealt with.  If we’ve had a demanding job before we had kids, how do we achieve work-life balance once we have kids? This may mean deciding whether to keep our full-time jobs or search for part-time work.  In this story, I also ask whether a supportive husband will help his wife solve a mystery that falls into their laps, or will he get fed up with her time-consuming efforts to solve it on her own?  Will the wife, in her search for the killer, find herself attracted to another man who offers to help her?  And how does life in an affluent suburb affect Alison, who’s among its less affluent residents?

I had fun writing this story, which deals with all of these questions.  At the same time, I delved into the time-honored phase, “the law is a jealous mistress.”  What does it mean for lawyers today?  I also liked flirting with the term “jealous mistress” as a term with a double meaning.  If you read Jealous Mistress, you’ll come to your own conclusions.

My third novel, Red Diana, is something of a sequel to A Quicker Blood.  Karen Clark reappears twelve years after we left her at the end of A Quicker Blood.  She has moved to San Francisco with her 8-year-old daughter Davida (called Davi) and loves her new life there.

One terrible day, Davi is abducted on Market Street, just outside the office building where Karen works.  It’s summer and Davi has pleaded with Karen to spend a day at Karen’s office.  After buying M&Ms at a 7-Eleven, Davi is suddenly grabbed by someone wearing a mask, and Karen is gripped by fear.  Davi is returned unharmed the next morning and Karen begins to relax, but she soon finds a threatening note pinned to Davi’s shirt: “Karen, you’re next.”

Karen must find out who grabbed Davi—and why.  Her only clues are Davis’s recall of a brown sofa and the words “Red Diana.”  With the help of SFPD detective Greg Chan, Karen begins her relentless pursuit of the cruel abductor who now threatens her own life.

Set in San Francisco, with flashbacks to Chicago and New York, this chilling psychological thriller explores a bunch of themes: The desire for revenge, the burden of guilt, and the tyranny of unethical lawyers and corrupt judges.  It also touches on the shattering pain of losing a loved one—and the many routes survivors take to deal with their loss.

Above all, the book focuses on the intense love between parent and child–what one psychoanalyst has called “indestructible, the strongest relationship on earth.”

Karen’s search for the abductor leads her to a charming San Francisco Victorian, where she confronts a disturbed killer who puts her life in peril.

Like my other two novels, Red Diana has earned many 5-star reviews, and I think you’ll find it an absorbing read.

To sum up:  Please forgive my shameless plug(s) and think about choosing one of my novels as a better-than-ordinary “beach read” this summer.  You can zip through all three of them pretty fast, and I think you’ll be pleased with the sharp writing style you’ve come to like in my blog posts.

Happy reading!

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Watching a new musical on Broadway 50-plus years ago

Posted on August 5, 2024 | 4 comments

   

In April 1973, my husband (I’ll call him Marv) and I left our home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and headed for New York City.  Marv was a terrific math professor at the University of Michigan, and he’d already earned tenure there.  Thanks to recognition by other mathematicians, he was invited to speak at a math conference to be held at NYC’s famed Biltmore Hotel, and I decided to tag along.

A bunch of my law-school classmates were living in NYC just then, and I contacted a few of them about getting together while Marv and I were in town.  One of my favorite classmates was my close friend Arlene, and she immediately made plans to see both of us one evening during our stay.

I was thrilled when Arlene surprised me with a terrific plan.  She was purchasing tickets for all three of us to see a hit musical playing on Broadway.  I’ve always been a huge fan of Broadway musicals, beginning when I was a kid, and I was excited at the prospect of seeing this one.  I may have heard something about it even before we got to NYC, but I didn’t know any details.  In the pre-internet era, it was hard to get details like that.

After a scrumptious dinner somewhere in Manhattan, the three of us set out for Broadway and the musical Arlene had chosen.  We excitedly took our seats in the balcony as the lights dimmed and a hush fell over the audience

As the curtain rose, I gasped. The musical was “Grease,” and it began at a 1950s class reunion at a Chicago public high school.  The graduation year, prominently displayed on the stage, was the same year that Marv and I had graduated from our own public high schools!  As we watched, our mouths agape, we soon figured out that the story focused on the “greasers” at the high school one of its writers attended.

The parallel with our own lives was undeniable.  No, we hadn’t attended schools where “greasers” dominated, but I clearly recalled the students my friends and I jokingly called “hoods”—short for “hoodlums.”  These kids were not terribly different from the working-class teenagers in “Grease.”  My school was dominated by middle-class kids, not the “hoods,” but we were all keenly aware of each other.

It turned out that the musical was first produced in Chicago in 1971, when Marv and I were living in California and totally unaware of local theater in Chicago.  It finally landed in NYC in 1972, about a year before we saw it, and it became the enduring hit we all know. Even better known: The 1978 film version that became a worldwide sensation.  “Grease” went on to earn both Broadway and movie fandom.

The music in the Broadway show we saw that night was astounding:  It borrowed the sounds of early rock-and-roll hits that Marv and I knew and loved.  It’s not surprising that many of the songs in “Grease” remain popular today. 

When the curtain finally came down, the three of us looked at each other.  We had all shared that era in the ‘50s just portrayed on the stage.  I was in a state of shock, trying to recover from the profound experience of reliving a slice of life from our high school days. 

You know what?  I don’t think I’ve ever completely recovered.

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Posted in 1950s, 1970s, American culture, Ann Arbor, Michigan, California, Chicago, class reunions, friends, friends, lifelong friends, New York City, rock and roll music, theater

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In Praise of San Francisco’s Weather

Posted on August 14, 2013 | Leave a comment

I moved to San Francisco eight years ago, and there’s much about the city that I truly love:  the breathtaking vistas, the natural beauty surrounding the city, the warmth of its inhabitants, and the rich assortment of parks, museums, theaters, concert halls, movie houses, restaurants, and shops.

There’s one more thing:  the weather.

I revel in the weather I’ve encountered in San Francisco.  After decades of living in a cold climate (mostly in Chicago), dealing with snow and ice for much of the year and heat and humidity for much of the rest, I relish the sunshine and cool breezes that San Francisco offers year-round.  People who’ve never lived in a cold climate can’t begin to imagine how difficult life there can be.  On many cold mornings I found myself crossing the bridge over the Chicago River, headed from the commuter train station to my office, snow and sleet blowing in my face.  No matter how many warm layers of clothing I’d wrap around my body, my face was largely exposed, bearing the brunt of the cold wind that persisted in hurling snow in my direction.

If you’ve never confronted them, let me assure you that icy sidewalks and streets are extremely treacherous.  Many of those attempting to walk on icy sidewalks have slipped and fallen, breaking bones and suffering concussions.  Driving on icy streets is equally hazardous, resulting in countless collisions.  Luckily, snow and ice are non-existent in San Francisco, relieving us of the challenges and pitfalls of negotiating on ice both on foot and in a vehicle.  Even rainy days don’t bother me, and locals who complain about the occasional chilly weather strike me as almost comically unaware of the reality faced by Americans in almost every other region of the county.

Unless you love hot weather and can’t wait to hit the beach, summers in San Francisco are delightful.  The temperature almost never rises above 80 degrees, and humidity barely reaches a noticeable level.  The contrast with places like Chicago, Boston, and New York is striking.  On recent trips to those cities, I encountered uncomfortably high humidity, thunderstorms, and temperatures in the 90s.  Extreme heat and humidity has plagued much of the nation this summer, but here in San Francisco, we’ve been as cool as cukes.

Air conditioning?  In San Francisco, we almost never need it, while most other regions of the country, including many parts of California, rely on air conditioning to survive.  I remember some vivid examples.  On one sweltering summer day in Ann Arbor, Michigan, my husband and mother joined me at Ann Arbor’s famed outdoor art festival.  I was surveying the artwork when l glanced at my mother’s face.  It was bright red. The thermometer on a nearby building read 99 degrees, and the humidity felt just as high.  We quickly abandoned the art festival and fled to our air-conditioned apartment.  On a recent trip to Boston, I was barely able to drag myself from the Harvard Square “T” to my daughter’s air-conditioned Cambridge apartment just a few blocks away, when both the temperature and the humidity hit 90-plus.  And don’t get me started on places like Arizona and Texas.

Here in San Francisco we save the financial cost of air conditioning, not to mention any feelings of guilt arising from  its demand on our energy resources.  And we don’t have to suffer the physical jolt of going from intense heat to intense cold every time we enter a super-air-conditioned building.

Our weather has another stellar feature.  Because San Franciscans can revel in sunshine and moderate temperatures all year long, we can spend much more time outdoors than most other Americans.  We’re not confined to exercising in sterile gray-walled fitness centers.  We have much better options.  I wake up every day almost certain that I’ll be able to take a walk, hike, or bike ride before the sun sets.

I don’t even mind the San Francisco fog that occasionally envelops the city.  Au contraire.  I think it creates a kind of magical aura over the city.  So long you remember to carry a light jacket, and drivers are careful maneuvering their vehicles in the fog, it really doesn’t have much of a downside.  Besides, if you want to escape the fog, you need travel only a short distance from the city in any direction.  The microclimates surrounding us are almost always fog-free.

Of course, life in San Francisco has its flaws.  For one thing, housing is more expensive than that in other cities (with the possible exception of NYC).  Rents are high, and on the rise as the city’s economy gets better and better, while buying a house in the most desirable neighborhoods has become more costly than ever.  And San Franciscans are constantly under the shadow of “The Big One.”  Perched as we are on the Pacific Rim, the threat of a major earthquake never really goes away.

But those of us who live here are willing to take those negatives along with all the positive features of life in the city.  Count me in.  I’m genuinely happy in my new hometown and especially delighted with its weather.  And when I recently came across the following story, reprinted from the San Francisco Chronicle of July 15, 1937, I realized that my reaction to the city’s weather is very much like that of a famous writer’s over 75 years ago.

The Chronicle reported:

Ernest Hemingway arrived in San Francisco yesterday ‘to get cool.’ On his first visit to [the city], he gulped in a few cubic yards of fog shortly after stepping from a …plane at [the airport] and sighed: ‘Say, this is great. After frying in New York, stewing down in Florida and sweltering in Los Angeles, this is something….  I can’t for the life of me see why anybody would ever move out of San Francisco, particularly in the summertime.’

Hey, Papa, when it comes to weather, we’re on the same page!

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