I grew up in North Quincy, Massachusetts, and went through the public school system. I wasn't a student who stood out… When I was sixteen, Jack Scanlon, a family friend, helped get me the midnight-to-eight weekend office boy job at the Record-American, Sunday Advertiser, a Hearst Newspaper. Those two-nights a week began my education into the world of journalism and politics. What I learned from the men and women on the Record and Advertiser was more important than anything I learned in college. I was fortunate to enter the world of journalism in its gritty days, when reporters came up the ranks from office boy, to cub, to reporter… Later, I left Boston and moved to Los Angeles, where I worked in TV and freelanced as a photojournalist for years. I served one year on the board of directors of the Press Photographers Association of Greater Los Angeles. I also married, fathered twin daughters (Seanan and Chela), and divorced, while in LA. When I got fed up with Hollyweird, I moved to Key West, where I went to work for Bernard Hunt at the daily Key West Citize I have spent another five years as the public information officer for the City of Key West… My mystery novel is fiction, but the city that looms in the background, the bars and restaurants and many of the characters that run through its pages are taken from real life.