We are delighted to welcome author Michael Sears to Omnimystery News today.
Michael's fourth novel to feature financial investigator Jason Stafford is Saving Jason (Putnam; February 2016 hardcover and ebook formats) and he has provided us with an introduction to his series character in a unique format, Jason Stafford writing about Jason Stafford.
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Photo provided courtesy of
Michael Sears
I think I must have been a bit weird as a kid. In my first month in kindergarten, I got bumped up a grade. My reading tested out at the third grade level and I knew my times tables up to ten. As if that were not enough, I was never an athlete. Though I grew to love watching baseball — a game of statistics and probabilities that appealed to my left brain, with a large dose of chaos in the form of random events which fed my right brain — I never played the game. Terrified of being hit by the ball, I never learned to catch or hit. I could throw, but not well enough to pitch. It wasn't only baseball, I did not respond to any sport that involved placing myself in the path of a projectile. Soccer, football, stickball, even dodgeball, and kickball were all out of the question. I might have been able to handle croquet, but no one in College Point, Queens ever played croquet. Ever.
Having your mother collapse on the street while walking you to school when you are six years old — and never seeing her again after the ambulance carries her away — leaves a scar. I was small, shy, younger than any of my classmates, and my mother was dead. Everyone at PS 129 knew who I was. Few were willing to hang out with me. How could I blame them? I wouldn't have known what to say to me, either.
Forty years after the event, my memories of her are gone. When I picture her face I see the woman in the pictures my father kept in our apartment. I cannot summon a single memory of her face or her voice. It's a block, I know, and not necessarily a healthy one. It's led to personality quirks, some of which I am, at least, aware of, while others lie under the surface of my psyche. I tend to protect women — all women, whether we are intimate or casual acquaintances and I am devastated when I fail at it.
There have been few women in my life, but the reasons for that go far beyond my mother's early death. I did not get my teen growth spurt until my first year of college. Though I suffered through crushes on girls in middle school and at Stuyvesant, I never did anything about it. I was terrified of speaking to girls, a not uncommon trait among the nerds, which in my case was aggravated by the fact that almost every girl in my class was taller than I, older, and more sexually developed. I didn't shave until high school.
High School. My commute took an hour and a quarter in each direction. A bus and two subways. I rarely saw the few friends I had made during middle school. Once outside of the classroom, most of my interaction with the world centered around the crowd at my father's bar, downstairs from the apartment. Mostly men, but not exclusively, I got to know their stories, their families, their hopes, and their tragedies. That bar was my living room. I often did my homework sitting on a barstool. Math and science, at any rate. Reading or writing demanded more of me, and I needed privacy to concentrate. But neither calculus nor physics distracted me from the parade of humanity that passed through that place.
I am always most comfortable in that environment, with or without a drink in my hand. A glass of seltzer or a bottle of light beer, it doesn't matter. It is the casual intimacy of the place that I crave. It feels like home.
But there was another legacy of growing up in my father's bar. I knew from a very early age that I was destined for something beyond College Point, Queens. Though I called it home, it was just where I came from, not where I was going. They knew it, too, those men and women, and their children who grew up, or old, in Sweeney's. They could see that I was different. The happier, more content members of that extended family applauded and encouraged me. But there were those who resented me, too. As though the story of my future wealth, and marriage to a beautiful model, living in a glass and chrome tower in Manhattan was written across my face. Would they have been different if they could also read about my fall from grace? The disaster of my career, my time in prison, and the rendering of my marriage? Would they have sympathized? Some of them, maybe. But others would have found more surety that my fall was punishment for overreach and everything I always deserved.
I have lived my whole life, save for a few years of college and graduate school, in New York City, but I come from a very small town.
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Michael Sears was a Managing Director for two different Wall Street firms, where he worked in the bond market for twenty years and, earlier, in foreign exchange and derivatives. Prior to returning to Columbia University for his MBA, he was, for eight years, a professional actor appearing at the Shakespeare Theatre of Washington, Playwritght's Theater of Washington, New Jersey Shakespeare Festival,The Comedy Stage Co., and, in the course of a single year, every soap opera shot in New York City. He is married to the artist and poet Barbara Segal and is the father of two handsome sons. Born in New York City, he lived for more than twenty years on Manhattan's Upper West Side and still misses it every day.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at MichaelSears.com and his author page on Goodreads, or find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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Saving Jason by Michael Sears
A Jason Stafford Novel
Publisher: Putnam
Jason Stafford used to be a hot Wall Street trader, went too far, and paid for it in prison. Now a financial investigator, he's been asked to look into rumors of a hostile takeover of his firm, but he has no idea it will turn his whole life upside down. Suddenly embroiled in a grand jury investigation of Mob-related activities on Wall Street, and threatened by some very serious men, he is thrust into witness protection with his young autistic son. And then his son disappears. Has he been kidnapped, or worse?
With no choice but to act, Stafford has no choice but to come out of hiding and risk everything to save his son, his firm, his pregnant girlfriend — and himself.
— Saving Jason by Michael Sears
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