Dear Reader,
I hope you enjoy Central Park West, a book I was never going to write, or likely even read. Let me explain.
In 1987, I read Scott Turow’s then-new book, Presumed Innocent, and loved it. I was about to become a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and the courtroom scenes and investigative twists lit me on fire. That was the life I wanted to live. The good news is that I actually did get the chance to live it, in different roles in different places. The bad news is that my crime fiction life was frozen at Turow for several decades. After days spent worrying about crime, terrorism, and espionage, I found it impossible to read fictionalized accounts of those things in my free time. I was exclusively a non-fiction reader.
When I got fired as FBI Director in 2017, I remained a non-fiction person, writing two books in that genre. But the second book, which was a collection of true stories from my career—designed to illuminate the values we must have in a justice system—started this new journey. My editor asked me to consider writing fictional stories. At first I resisted, but the farther I got from my government service, the easier I found it to read—and then to write—about it. I found myself reading John Le Carre, something I had not been able to do while in service, and learned about his own challenges in writing fiction drawn from his work life.
With no hope of ever being Le Carre, I still decided to give fiction-writing a try. As I started work on what became Central Park West, our daughter Maurene was prosecuting Ghislaine Maxwell—Jeffrey Epstein’s partner in child exploitation—and my wife, Patrice, was attending sessions in Manhattan federal court. I was eager to go, both to watch our daughter and to sit in Courtroom 318, where she was trying the case—the very same room where I had prosecuted mobsters when Maurene was a little girl. But I was banned by my daughter, who judged me too tall to hide, even in a COVID mask: “It’d be a thing, Dad.”
Although I was forced to get the Maxwell trial action second-hand, Maurene’s work warranted making Central Park West’s protagonist a woman and putting many scenes in Courtroom 318. I tried to instill in Nora Carleton the strength and intelligence of all four of my (tall) daughters.
The result is a legal thriller in the strictest sense, but it is much more than that—an exploration of the criminal justice system and also a drama involving complicated characters struggling to be parents, friends, and colleagues. I hope this story, and these people, stay with you for a long time—at least until you return in the second book.
JC
