STORIES FROM THE SHORE
MURDER ON THE STEEL PIER
Book One of the Tess Mancini Time Travel Mysteries
Coming Spring 2025
Boston Public Library, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The morning after a blowout thirty-fifth birthday celebration in Atlantic City, crime reporter and party girl Tess Mancini wakes up in an unfamiliar place—1955. Bread is eighteen cents a loaf, Ike occupies the White House, and the Boardwalk is crawling with vintage cars and vintage wise guys. A bewildered Tess is sure of only two things: One, she’s not crazy, and two, the clothes are fabulous. And somehow, she’s living the life of her Great Aunt Theresa, who disappeared decades before Tess’s birth.
In her 1950s existence, Tess is a reporter for the local newspaper, living and working at a boarding house owned by her Zia Antonetta, an Italian immigrant with secrets of her own. Tess also discovers that Theresa has a kid brother, teenaged troublemaker Val Mancini—also known as Tess’s paternal grandfather. Though determined to return to her own time, Tess’s curiosity takes over. What happened to the first Theresa Mancini? And is Tess’s trip through time somehow connected to her aunt’s fate?
But when young Val is accused of murdering a boarding house guest, a Nazi in hiding, Tess ends up with two investigations on her hands, and though desperate to leave the Nifty Fifties, she’s stuck in time until she can prove Val’s innocence. As she searches for answers, she finds allies in a dishy police detective and a suspiciously charming fellow reporter. She also crosses paths with a Mid-Century icon of science—possibly the one person who can help her get back home—but not until she finds a way to keep her grandfather off Death Row.
Because before Tess can get back to the future … she needs to make sure she has one.
