This story follows a young boy’s expulsion from parochial school, gambling, stealing, selling discarded wares for pennies, interludes with burlesque dancers at the Old Howard Theatre, and surviving the sanguinary streets of Boston during the Great Depression.

The Train Runner is an autofiction project and a collaboration with my 96-year-old father, a first-generation Italian-American born in East Boston in 1928; his parents emigrated from Sicily. He describes his father as friendly and his mother as formidable. The characters and events are inspired by my father's unconventional childhood, growing up in Medford and its complicated ties to the Mafia.

It’s May 1988. Two years after her parents’ deaths, grief-stricken Isabel Pope, a 27-year-old human rights attorney, abandons her Boston law practice for Croatia—her childhood summer haven—accepting a temporary university teaching position. She arrives ahead of the country’s first democratic elections in half a century, hoping to witness this historic transformation.

Reunited with old friends, Isabel becomes dangerously entangled when she falls for two men—one Croatian, one Bosnian—as ethnic divisions tear the nation apart. When democracy dissolves into war, personal passions collide with political allegiances. With betrayal everywhere, Isabel must navigate treacherous international politics to find her friends, believed to be trapped in Eastern Mostar’s ghetto, while fighting for her freedom and a way home. If she survives.

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A contemporary historical fiction novel for new adult and adult readers, set in the former Yugoslavia, this story is based on actual events of the Bosnian War and my stays in the region that spanned seven years from 1990 through 1996.

Taken from my travel journals, An Accidental Pilgrim's Tale tells the story of a month-long overseas journey with my mother in tow for her to fulfill a dream pilgrimage in the Balkans, followed by a rattled stay with relatives in the tiny Italian village where her father was born and raised.

First scribbled on the pages of my journal, entitled, “Un mese con mia madre,” are scenes filled with humor, humility, and heartache. If you’ve ever globetrotted with your untraveled mother to foreign countries, then you capisce. Between the mountains and memories, what began as daughterly duty unfolded into a chronicle of tangled roots and revelations.