Author Calls Naples Home
Lawrence De Maria, author of "Sound of Blood: a Jake Scarne Thriller," is adding his name to the list of notable Naples authors. Among them are Robin Cook, whose medical mysteries including "Coma" captivate readers and movie goers, and Janet Evanovich, whose characters have brought laughter to hundreds of thousands of loyal fans. Her latest book, "Smokin' Seventeen," sold more than 200,000 copies on the first day it was published.
It was his hobnobbing with Wall Street bigwigs that was the perfect training ground for the fiction author he is now, De Maria said recently.
After a stint in the Marines, De Maria got his start as a reporter for The Staten Island Advance, covering crime and politics…some real, some imagined.
He covered the first of a string of trials involving Mafia don John Gotti, and later Hollywood's version in The Godfather, some of which was filed on Staten Island.
De Maria left the Advance with an Associated Press Spot News Award and it wasn't long before he was exposed to what he calls "venality on a whole new scale." At The New York Times, De Maria covered the stock market, credit market, options, real estate and just about anything else financial.
You can tell from the characters in Sound of Blood that De Maria has drawn on his experiences at The Times and later Forbes, and then a brief – and what he calls "lamentable" – stint in corporate communications.
Once he moved to Naples a few years ago, he started his first novel while heading up the Naples Sun Times until it was purchased by the Naples Daily News. Now that his first thriller has been published, he intends to stick to fantasy.
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