There’s something I should clarify for you up front. Here’s what I’m not going to do in this book. I’m not going to write any more paragraphs like the following one.

My hometown of Newburgh is 4.8 square miles bordered on the east by the Hudson River and on the south by the Hudson Highlands, approximately sixty miles north of Manhattan. Newburgh has its share of significant addresses. From his headquarters on Liberty Street, George Washington, in April 1783, announced the end of the Revolutionary War—and the beginning of America. On Montgomery Street, Thomas Edison built a generating plant that electrified the city in 1884. Off Cochecton Turnpike, the Brookside Drive-In Theater was a regional destination where seven hundred cars could park in view of a two-thousand-square-foot screen mounted on a seventy-foot tower. I was born in Newburgh and lived on North Plank Road, Gidney Avenue, and North Street before my father changed jobs and our family was uprooted to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

That’s all factual, yes, but this is a book of true stories the way I remember them. I’m sure I’ll get a few things wrong. But I was five foot eleven in high school, and I could dunk a basketball the summer before my senior year. I did take that joy ride I’ll tell you about later. And the first girl I ever kissed was named Veronica Tabasco.

I wasn’t a big reader in grammar or high school. Sometimes that shows in my prose. My mother and father were readers, though. They set a great example. There were open books everywhere in our house, left spread-eagled in the living room, kitchen, even some bathrooms. That book-in-every-room approach is supposed to be encouraging but it didn’t do anything for me, at home or in Catholic school. I had a goofy-high IQ, but the books, essays, and stories they tried to force-feed us in class were especially boring to me and seemed irrelevant to most of us.

So how did I wind up writing, and reading, so many books? I’m going to try to tell you how it happened. As I said early on, this is a mystery story.

Actually, come to think of it, quite a few people die.