The Paper Pirate by Dawn McIntyre

The five partners who own the small town book store The Paper Pirate have two issues to worry.. There is the looming deadline to pay off a balloon mortgage . In addition  a menacing stealthy crook who systematically searches first the shop, then each of their homes. He takes nothing and barely leaves traces of his presence As such,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-so 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  he 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 . And he could fit into the blank spaces of a copy of The Stargazer at Dawn . He then 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 A partner who claims to be unpublished actually is a one-hit-wonder with a thirty-year-old best-selling novel followed by a crippling literary failure. The last has a family with criminal connections—he’s spent half a lifetime avoiding them.

About the Author:

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 novels.

Among them are stories about a young girl struggling to emerging from the shadow of an abusive mother to discover the rest of the world and her place in it, 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 a thirty-something journalist who 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.

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 followed a quirky tale of a young couple threatened by a hex visited upon them by a jealous ex-lover. The 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.

Her first book brought to life an ornery, twentysomething woman, viewed during the summer that changed her life, and her second, self-published novel addressed the prevalence, stupidity and tenacity of prejudice. The cozy mystery, The Paper Pirate, published by Running Wild Press, will make its debut on November 8, 2022.

McIntyre founded, along with two fellow authors, a writers’ workshop in 2013 that met at the Hawley Library until the Covid pandemic necessitated a switch to virtual gatherings. She continues to write fiction populated by richly nuanced characters in deceptively simple, familiar settings.

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