Sleeping with Jack Kerouac — Sean McGrady

Scotty Dorian has grown up and lived in a rarefied world of books-a heady cocktail of famous authors and their mad, drunken pursuit in the name of their art-a life of literary and moneyed privilege. She owns regal homes in Manhattan and East Hampton and one half of a great publishing concern. Scotty is beautiful and accomplished, seeming to have it all-so why would she need to murder her literary agent husband? And how on earth did Jack Kerouac, the King of the Beats and dead since 1969, become her accomplice? From the start we know that Scotty's husband has met a grisly end. She pleads her innocence and tells us he was a narcissist and a sociopath-a danger to her life-are we to believe her? So begins the twisty ride of SLEEPING WITH JACK KEROUAC, as Scotty Dorian begins to come to terms with buried parts of herself, those things that have been in her always but which are only now finally stirred to life. The novel's heart pumps with the blood of sexual identity, the knowledge that the hidden voices inside of ourselves often entwine with the voices found inside of our best novels. SLEEPING WITH JACK KEROUAC is its own martini shaker, two parts literary thriller, one part memoir and a couple of dashes of rollicking romp. This is a novel that could only have been written by a literary insider, an author who grew up in his own world of books and the broken, funny, charismatic people who actually write them. Sean McGrady, a long-time resident of Northport-a small town on the north shore of Long Island that Jack Kerouac also called home-now splits his time between Olympia, Washington and the California Bay Area. Mr. McGrady had four novels published with Pocket Books in the 1990s- three of those novels were recently reissued in new trade paperback editions by Simon & Schuster. The critically acclaimed Eamon Wearie series includes DEAD LETTERS, SEALED WITH A KISS, and TOWN WITHOUT A ZIP. THEY DIED IN VAIN, a book detailing the best and most overlooked mystery novels of the last century and edited by Jim Huang, describes the Eamon Wearie series as "emblematic of life in America at the end of the twentieth century." Richard Lipez in New York Newsday: "Eamon Wearie...will remind some readers of Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder ten-or-so years before Scudder faced the central fact of his middle age and joined AA." Critic Kate Derie says the characters are "well drawn and vivid" and that the dialogue and settings "ring true" and further describes federal agent Wearie as retaining "something of the best idealism of the best private eyes, a man who is not himself mean although he walks the mean passageways of Postal Depot 349." Publishers Weekly simply declared, "McGrady's prose scores." SLEEPING WITH JACK KEROUAC is Sean McGrady's first new novel in over twenty years.