A Coming of Age Story

Today and tomorrow, November 30 and December 1, the Kindle version of Alice Black can be downloaded for free. It’s also on Kindle Unlimited.

Alice’s perfect childhood changes when at age six, shortly after a visit from a policeman, her father and brother disappear from their home in Queens. Alice is left with a shell of a mother who never recovers from the incident but never offers any explanation. Alice struggles through life as a misfit, growing up with a mother who refuses to move on. In her final year of high school, she meets Doug, a Columbia law student who talks her into leaving her clinging, out-of-step-with-time mother and going off with him and four others to the wilds of West Virginia to live primitively in a run-down farmhouse. Despite the living conditions, Alice has never been happier, but after five years, she learns her mother is dying and heads back to Queens. After her mother’s death, she sells their home, the one she thinks is to a real estate developer who plans on leveling the house along with the others on the block for a strip mall.

Finally, things are looking up for Alice. She finds a nice apartment, gains a best friend, Chen, whose uncle owns the Chinese restaurant across the street, and gets hired at a health food store with a great boss. She is ready to begin life anew until a plainclothes detective shows up where she works. A skeleton is uncovered in what was formerly Alice’s backyard. Alice fears the skeleton is that of her father.

Cryptic messages from fortune cookies and the return of Doug to New York, who offers to help, as well as meeting Tom, who works at the construction site of her old house, put her on a mission to find out what happened to her father and brother.