Prequel to CLIFFHANGER

The basic premise of CLIFFHANGER has a lot to do with how we misunderstand what is happening around us, deeply immersed in our own daily tasks as we are. And it’s not just what is going on externally, but what's going on in our personal lives that we misunderstand. My inspiration for CLIFFHANGER was this: Can we ever really know someone? That remains a powerful driver, but other elements have gained weight and impact.

Let’s focus for a minute on the related question: Does anyone understand what is going on in the world around us? Personal viewpoints in CLIFFHANGER give us very different answers: Lilian’s, Eileen’s, Jake Senior’s and Juan’s all vary. Ellie’s view of her world is a heartbreaking surprise as it unfolds throughout the story’s arc. And Chris has his own unique hopes and fears, ones that change so much as he ages from four to fourteen. In Philip’s first person narration, we see life through his blindfolds, and that, I think, reflects real life, where we are tasked not only with trying to understand the world we live in, micro and macro, but also determine what about it is important to us and what can be ignored.

Looking back to that era, events were very different from what we were told by the US government, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS News. Misstatements and lies took years to be corrected. One brilliant, recent reshaping of New York City history, Bench Ansfield’s BORN IN FLAMES; The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, revisits the famous 1970s burning of the Bronx, explained at the time as the destruction of a borough by the Black and Brown residents who lived there. This terrific book was preceded by 2019’s documentary Decade of Fire, a visual treatment of the same ideas — Ansfield was a researcher on that film. In his book, Ansfield goes into great depth to explain how urban renewal, redlining, and cynical approaches to insurance policies clearly identify the landlords as the culprits of arson-for-profit. That’s like an earthquake for those of us who lived then and there. It destroys some perceptions and unearths things never seen before.

Keep it in mind as you read ZONE OF DECEIT. You’ll find out pretty quickly in Book One, CLIFFHANGER, that something is wrong in Philip Sanders’ personal life. And it won’t take much longer to see that things are definitely not right in 1984 New York City.