AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT: Nanci E. LaGarenne

Nanci E. LaGarenne was born in Brooklyn and lives on the East End of Long Island. She is a former teaching assistant in the Autistic Unit at P. S.236 in Brooklyn, a child care coordinator at The Retreat, a domestic violence shelter on Long Island, and freelance journalist for Dan's Papers and contributing writer to The Montauk Sun. Her novel, Cheap Fish is a local tribute to commercial fishermen in Montauk. LaGarenne was a karaoke host for twelve years in a local dive bar, Liars Saloon, which features in her book. 

Refuge, her second book, is an inspirational story of female friendship among domestic abuse survivors, set in Brooklyn and Ireland. 

The bitter end, a sequel to Cheap Fish, returns to Montauk with another murder mystery. 

Her new novel is Scape Ghost, set in California in the 60's & 70's, it is a famous cold case fictionally solved. It is available now on Amazon.com

Q: What inspired you to write Scape Ghost?
Answer: I was intrigued when I visited Alcatraz about the close quarters of Warden's house and guards who lived on Alcatraz Island to the prison itself. As I walked the grounds and saw the ruins of the houses, and took the tour inside Alcatraz itself, I wondered could those three escapees have survived?  And if so, what became of them?

Q: The story of the escape is ripped from the headlines. June, 11, 1962, three prisoners of Alcatraz, an island in San Francisco Bay, escaped under the cover of darkness, and their bodies were never found, so the cold case remains open. It has sparked the public's interest ever since, people playing amateur sleuth and guessing what happened to them?
Answer: I decided to solve the mystery and have the three men survive, and focus on the main prisoner or ringleader of the escape, Frank Lee Morris, a thief who reinvents himself, as Cincinnatus Jones, pilgrim and avid reader who hides out in abandoned cabin high in the Oakland hills. What happens to him was as much a surprise to me as it will be to my readers.

Q: Have you written fiction before?
Answer: Yes, Scape Ghost is my fourth novel. Cheap Fish a Montauk tale, came out in 2013. It was followed in 2015, by Refuge, an inspirational domestic violence survivors story set in Brooklyn and Ireland. In 2021, the bitter end, I returned to Montauk and created the Cheap Fish sequel.  
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Q: Are you writing a book now?
Answer: I'm working on a novel about two Irish women, descendants of female pirates, who did in fact exist in history, though we don't hear much about them. It takes the reader from Kinsale in Ireland to the California Delta, a series of river towns with a storied and fascinating history.

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Visit Nanci on her website: 
www.nancilagarenne.com

LINK for BOOK:
https://www.amazon.com/Scapeghost-Nanci-LaGarenne/dp/B0BZB5NT5J