After Reading Part Two: A Verdict!

Barry Willdorf's Seventies trilogy is a brilliant creation! I wasn't able to put the book down. In A Shot in the Arm, Barry Willdorf once more writes up a storm.  Just as in the previous installment, Burning Questions, attorney Nate Lewis bumbles his way into a dark murder plot, but it's the reader who gets hooked. His re-creation of period detail, mood, and state of mind is right on the money, and his characters rock. Willdorf understands the dark side of the law and the dark side of this country. 
Mark Rudd author of Underground: My life in SDS and the Weathermen

A Reviewer from The King's English Bookstore in SLC Wants Book Two!

Burning Questions, Barry Willdorf   (9781611602685) Whiskey Creek Press

Willdorf’s previous novel, Flight of the Sorceress, took the reader back into Roman times.  It was a page-turner of an historic novel.  Burning Questions is another historic novel, but one within the memory of many of its readers.  Willdorf knows the world of the ‘60’s and the setting of Gloucester, MA.  It is a time when a young, inexperienced legal intern can spend his time surfing and drinking rather than working on his upward mobility.  When the local big-shot firm asks him to investigate the supposed suicide of a wealthy young man on behalf of the disbelieving mother, Nate Lewis, sees some easy money, but, in reality may be set up for failure.  Nate’s foray into the world of the rich is balanced by meeting the dead man’s girlfriend, Christina who is beautiful, Portuguese and poor.   Christina and the boyfriend discovered a plan to burn down the town’s old hotels to be replaced by new real estate developments.  Now, Kenny, the boyfriend, is dead and Christina and Nate are in the sights of the arsonist and the local police.  Caught between the wealthy and powerful of the town and the arsonist, the two find themselves in a flight for their lives on a cross-country trip in an aging Plymouth Valiant following the sun to California.  Book 2 of the adventures of Nate and Christina, A Shot in the Arm, comes out this year, and I want to know what happens when they reach the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco in the ‘70’s.  

Wendy Foster Leigh

Burning Questions gets a story in Gloucester Times!

January 19, 2012

A lawyer's Cape Ann thriller

By Gail McCarthy Staff Writer

A 66-year-old former trial lawyer with ties to Cape Ann has published a mystery-thriller novel — one based in Gloucester and infused with its colorful history. 

Barry S. Willdorf, who settled in San Francisco decades ago, titled the first book in his trilogy "Burning Questions," which is set in 1969. That is an era he knows well, having lived here part-time here and having grown up in Malden. 

Willdorf said the novel brims with rich recollections of Gloucester and Cape Ann during the 1950s and '60s. The story recounts the blaze that gutted the Oceanside Hotel, which began a trend that transformed the Magnolia district from an upscale tourist destination to a community of summer homes.

Willdorf used to live in Magnolia across from the old Surf Restaurant, and is old enough to remember the Oceanside Hotel fire in 1957. 

To read the whole article click: http://www.gloucestertimes.com/lifestyle/x1070344323/A-lawyers-Cape-Ann-thriller

Another Great Review for Burning Questions!

Just read Burning Questions last night.  I loved it!  In fact, I woke up around 3 am this morning just to finish it.  Nate's a great character.  I haven't read a murder mystery in awhile, but I used to read them a lot.  I always thought it would be cool to have a detective who blabbed everything to everyone, kept no secrets, just to see what people were going to do.  You created one, and the concept works.  Congratulations! Loved the period details, too, the pay phones, Sunoco station, the food.  Mark Rudd, author of Underground: My life in SDS and the Weathermen

READING AT "WHY THERE ARE WORDS"

Get a peek at my new novel, A SHOT IN THE ARM and the whole 1970s Trilogy at Why There Are Words. A literary event not to be missed.
March 8, 2012 Studio 333,   333 Caledonia St.,   Sausalito, CA 94965 7-9pm

EXCERPT FROM "A SHOT IN THE ARM"

Here's an excerpt from Part 2 of the 1970s Trilogy: A Shot In The Arm:

Twenty thousand dollars was a hell of a lot of dough back in 1973, especially if it came in cash and you didn’t mention it to the tax man. In many nice parts of San Francisco, you could get three bedrooms, a view of downtown, and have some bread left over. Scuttlebutt told me that twenty Gs was the standard retainer for someone looking at a murder rap, so that was how much I quoted Umoja Simama.

I was running a shoestring law practice in the Mission at the time. One of his lieutenants, Oso Pardo, showed up at my office with a silvery metal briefcase, snapped it open and dumped packets of bills—a year’s supply of cash—all over my desk. I’d hoped that by asking for that kind of money, Umoja would go looking for another mouthpiece. I wanted out, especially for the sake of my relationship with Christina. But as fate had it, Umoja was unaccountably flush at just that moment.

You see dough like that, you get greedy. Your mind gets addled. So I ignored my better judgment and the advice of everyone around me. I took the money in denial that I was making a Faustian bargain by accepting the loot.

FIRST PRE-PUB REVIEW FOR "A SHOT IN THE ARM"

This second book in Barry S. Willdorf’s seventies trilogy is set in the Bay Area where people’s lawyer Nate Lewis is torn between defending the oppressed, making a name for himself, and full-throttle self-destructive behavior. The fast-moving novel brings to life a world that is at once familiar– tourists are still all over Fisherman’s Wharf– and also markedly different– the main character complains about $2.00 movies.
    The primary narrator is Nate himself, who takes on a case he knows he shouldn’t.  He is drawn to– okay, a sucker for– black militants who appear to be taking a fall for someone else’s crime.    The legal details are sharp; the drinking and drugging and low life neighborhoods are Day-Glo vivid.  The plot has plenty of twists and turns, but the real interest is less in whodunit than in how Nate almost loses his life as well as the love of his life.  Nate is smart and reasonably brave, but in the end is saved from himself and some really bad actors by someone even smarter and braver. 
    I was glad to know he made it, and that there’s at least one more novel out there about him and his world.



Meredith Sue Willis, Author of Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel and Out of the Mountains.