This story came about from a newspaper article on a man who admitted to killing his girlfriend and burying the body on Staten Island, New York, twenty years ago. Combine it with a magazine article on the subject of C-U (callous and unemotional) kids, and the many poignant stories that came out of Superstorm Sandy, some from friends, and the novel began to take shape.
Writing it, I have taken a few geographical liberties with my setting in Midland Beach on Staten Island. You cannot see across to Manhattan from there; from most homes, you can’t even see the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, only a couple of miles away. The street described as Baden Avenue may be more like a street you would find in the communities of South Beach or Shore Acres. Yet Midland Beach became a kind of hallowed ground to me, in that eleven people lost their lives there during the storm. So forgive me the small tinkering with fact; the book needed to be set there.
Two sources were keenly helpful on the subject of C-U kids, who may manifest the early signs of psychopathic behavior, as well as children who suffer from Asperger’s syndrome and autism. “When Is a Problem Child Truly Dangerous?” published in the May 13, 2012, edition of The New York Times Magazine, and the groundbreaking study Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, by Andrew Solomon (Scribner, 2012), recommended to me by my friend Margery Mayer. I couldn’t have written this book nearly as well without them.
A quick thanks to my editing and agenting team, Henry Ferris, Julia Wisdom, and Simon Lipskar, who know the unconventional and sometimes maddening way this book got done, but in the end, gives birth, I hope, to something of lasting value. And to Cole Hager and Joe Volpe, who really keep these departments moving.
And to my sister, Liz Scoponich, who showed me how a boatyard looks in winter, which I, keeping in character, trashed.
My wife, Lynn, and my kids always pitch in with my books, sometimes by helping to problem-solve and talk things out, sometimes by just being there. But I’d like to take this moment to give a long-overdue shout-out to my son, Nick, who first spoke to me about Florida pill mills as a possible subject for a thriller (which grew into 15 Seconds), and showed me an article from Playboy on the bloody drug wars in the Sinaloa province of Mexico, which became what you might call the MacGuffin, or driving plot device, for No Way Back, and whom I managed not to mention in two previous acknowledgments. So here’s to finally correcting that oversight, my tall, savvy son, though, at long last, you’ve had absolutely zero to do with this book!
And speaking of MacGuffins, this book is dedicated to the memory of Michael Palmer; ours was a late-blossoming friendship, but one that I will miss. He used that term more than anyone I know in his talks on how to construct a thriller, and were it anyone with less warmth or passion you might go, “All right, all right, would you stop with all the MacGuffins already …”
And so I will.