Paper Pirate
As if the looming deadline to pay off a balloon mortgage isn’t enough to worry about, the five partners who own the small town book store The Paper Pirate find themselves menaced by a stealthy crook who systematically searches first the shop, then each of their homes. Because he takes nothing and barely leaves traces of his presence, the police can’t be of much help, and simply promise to keep an eye on Charlie Santorelli, Lavinia “Vinnie” Holcomb, Al Rockleigh, Felicia Cocolo, and Lenora Stern. It’s a mystery to them but the reader knows that Rick Foster, a shady rare-books dealer and his sidekick Nina Bartov are on the hunt for a particular old volume that sits unnoticed on a shelf in The Paper Pirate’s used book section. It’s an obscure early work of the not-terribly-successful author Benjamin Conway, and it’s badly defaced—but a very wealthy man is willing to pay Rick a half a million dollars for it. Seems an ancestor of his eluded the henchmen of a nineteenth-century dictator by escaping to New York, and eventually took refuge in the northeastern Pennsylvania countryside. Before he was captured and killed, he’d scribbled as much evidence of the tyrant’s sins as he could fit into the blank spaces of a copy of The Stargazer at Dawn and hid it where he hoped his comrades would find it. They never did. The five friends also are members of a writers’ group, and each of them has a secret. One is penning an erotic novel on the sly, another hides a painful estrangement with an only child, and a deadly teenaged mistake causes a third to sabotage her every chance at happiness in the present. A partner who claims to be unpublished actually is a one-hit-wonder with a thirty-year-old best-selling novel followed by a crippling literary failure, and the last has a family with criminal connections—he’s spent half a lifetime avoiding them.
Dawn McIntyre is a New Jersey native and long-time resident of rural Pennsylvania. After years of remodeling houses and working in corporate America, she began devoting more time to her true passion: building with words. The result, so far, has been a portfolio of short stories and four novels. Among them are Julia’s World, a story about a young girl struggling to emerge from the shadow of an abusive mother to discover the rest of the world and her place in it; Distant Relations, about a teen who escapes her stifling extended family to start fresh in the home of her estranged father—a man who realizes too late how much he wants the daughter he left behind; and The Study, in which a thirty-something journalist discovers the illicit secrets of a historic figure he’s researching and must face a decision to reveal and profit from them, or to conceal and protect the reputations of long-dead people he’s come to admire and respect. Dead Inside, the story of a middle-aged woman who impulsively reaches out to offer comfort to a guilt-ridden stranger and finds that her good deed has only dredged up misery from her own past follows Nala’s Dress, a quirky tale of a young couple threatened by a hex visited upon them by a jealous ex-lover. The Festival, a twice-told yarn about a literary grave robber planning to plagiarize a story entrusted to her by an adoring fan was written in response to a prompt suggested by a friend, as was the all-dialogue historical heart-to-heart between a young gay man and his mischievous aunt, The Visit. Her first book, Chance Hill, brought to life an ornery, twentysomething woman, viewed during the summer that changed her life, and her first published novel, Zookeeper, addressed the prevalence, stupidity, and tenacity of prejudice. She founded, along with two fellow authors, a writers’ workshop in 2013 that met at a local library until the Covid pandemic necessitated a switch to virtual gatherings. She continues to write fiction peopled by richly nuanced characters in deceptively simple, familiar settings.
