Jeffery Deaver: The Twelfth Card

Special thanks, as always, to Madelyn Warcholik.

For those readers browsing through guide books in hopes of taking a walking tour of Gallows Heights, you can stop searching. While my depiction of life in nineteenth-century Manhattan is otherwise accurate and there were indeed a number of such villages on the Upper West Side that ultimately were swallowed up by the city’s urban sprawl, Gallows Heights and the nefarious doings I describe there are solely creations of my imagination. The eerie name served my purpose, and I figured that Boss Tweed and his cronies at Tammany Hall wouldn’t mind if I laid a few more crimes at their feet. After all, as Thompson Boyd would say, “It’s only a question of where you put the decimal point.”

Former journalist, folksinger and attorney Jeffery Deavers’ novels have appeared on a number of best-seller lists around the world, including The New York Times , the Times of London and the Los Angeles Times . The author of twenty novels, he’s won a Steel Dagger (for Garden of Beasts ) and a Short Story Dagger (for a story in Twisted ) from the British Crime Writers Association, and has been nominated for five Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, an Anthony Award and a Gumshoe Award. He is also a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year and is a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award. His book A Maiden’s Grave was made into an HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and his novel The Bone Collector was a feature release from Universal Pictures, starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. His most recent books are Gardenof Beasts , The Vanished Man and Twisted: Collected Stories . And, yes, the rumors are true, he did appear as a corrupt reporter on his favorite soap opera, As the World Turns . Readers can visit his website at www.jefferydeaver.com.