This is  what I love to write: fiction based on facts. Also called historical fiction.

We spent a month in Salerno, Italy, and I learned about the Camorra Mafia in Naples and Salerno. But a member of the Camorra I met told me that to use the Camorra in a story, I needed to come up with a unique business. "They can't compete with the businesses of the Sicilian mobs. The Camorra would be crushed by the Sicilians."

 

Salerno is a port city on the edge of Italy's Amalfi Coast, overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. It serves as a major hub for industrial shipping, where shipping containers are loaded, unloaded, transferred, and temporarily stored between different transport modes: ships, trucks, and trains.  The house we rented in Salerno sat high on a ridge, overlooking the port. As we sat on our deck looking out at the ships coming in and out of the  Salerno port, the idea hit me. 

 

Bodies. Cadavers. 

 

This is where fiction starts—an idea like a light bulb going off in your brain, illuminating a world that didn’t exist a moment before. In the late 1960's, when Alone in the Fight takes place, medical science around the world was dealing with new diseases: heart disease, various cancers, brain tumors, strokes, and hypertension, and smoking-related diseases. Medical schools were under pressure to identify cures and drugs to save people's lives, and to do this, they needed cadavers for their students —  donations and unclaimed bodies were not enough. 

     Enter the black market, or what the Camorra called "the invisible dead." The Salerno Cammora entered the body business and set up a base in America to orchestrate this business. They didn't select New York or Chicago, but a place that wouldn't draw attention, where nobody would look: the Hill. One man learned about the invisible dead on the Hill, but no one would believe him. No one except a tough Marine, a Vietnam hero. Detective George Rausher of the Lower Merion police force, along with his most unusual and surprising sidekick, killer Buster Hicks, stepped into the plot with more questions than answers.

     The story has more twists and turns than a city street at midnight—where even Detective Rausher can’t tell who’s hunting and who’s being hunted. Hicks came home with the war still in him—drawn to the chaos, like a man who had seen too much and longed for the fight. Hicks understood violence in a way that made others uneasy—and made him invaluable to Rausher.

     The Cammora team consisted of hospital orderlies, undertakers, cemetery caretakers, grave diggers, and nurses with too much credit card debt.

     This "On the Hill book" is another unputdownable that will pull you in fast and never let you catch your breath.

     A great story, like a light bulb clicking on in Salerno, Italy.