What Ever Happened to the Guy Who Wrote Pepper’s Ghost?

Following the breadcrumb trail of one of those books you could never pick back up once you put it down

It began on the South Ferry to Shelter Island, when a girl with a dog and a crisis handed me her keys—and somehow, her fate.
For two summers, in a cottage in the hollow the crickets kept our secrets. And every weekend she took that Greyhound bus thinking she was coming to see me among the brick and gargoyles and ivy. But really she was claiming her piece of a much longer history.

In 2015, I published a high-tech literary romance called Pepper’s Ghost, about a military contractor who hijacks a classified time-shifting project to replay the day he lost the love of his life. It was pulled from circulation in 2019 as part of a quiet settlement with the U.S. government.

But not before it caught the attention of F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar James L. W. West III—yes, the one who consulted for Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby. Our collaboration on a short film called Monuments led to historical discoveries that will now appear in my next book, due out fall 2025.

In a little-known footnote to Pepper’s Ghost, I disappeared from publication under my own name. But I did not stop writing. Now I am coming out with a new book—Gatsby’s Angel—about Leonardo da Vinci’s first solo painting, Ginevra de’ Benci, and the 500-year love story to which Yale and Shelter Island were only the closest stars of a constellation that has been hiding in plain sight for the last five centuries