Nightswimming

Apr 24, 2025

Several years ago, I was writing a novel that never really came to life the way I’d wanted. It was a quiet (“literary”) novel. Too quiet. That novel had a minor character—a rookie cop—named Jamie.

To develop Jamie, I researched police work, and there was just one of those moments where I had the thought I could do something interesting by writing a procedural. And then the thought that immediately followed was that it would be a bad idea, it was so far out of my comfort zone. But I didn’t quite let go of the possibility.

Pushing myself out of my comfort zone had been kind of haunting me for a while. There’s the great David Bowie quote:

Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.

I’d always wanted to push myself further but never saw an opportunity. I’d always thought that going beyond my comfort zone meant branching into poetry or speculative fiction. I never expected it would mean writing genre.

Ultimately, I stayed with Jamie as a character because I wanted to expand my writing with crime fiction. And today I’m thrilled to announced that my debut novel Nightswimming, will be published this year on June 26.

The cover photograph is by Michael R. Sporzarsky, courtesy Paterson Museum

Crime fiction has always been a vehicle to explore society’s views on women. Whether it’s the femme fatale in noir or the first girl in a slasher film, women who cross the line sexually are punished. These are the accepted tropes, and they persisted into the 1970s. Even in the wake of the sexual revolution and the women’s movement and all those promises of freedom, female identity was still defined by the culture.

Writing genre, what has always been most important to me is staying true to its history and traditions and staying true to the basics of storytelling, but to also understand the tropes.

What I wanted to know—as a woman—was how the 1970s impacted men, and I found that crime fiction gave me a way to explore that question. How did a young man, a rookie police officer, rising within the ranks of an “old boys” institution absorb the message of the women’s movement? Did the demand that women be seen and treated differently in the culture change what it meant to be a “stand up guy?” Was it no longer enough to be loyal to the men you worked with, did respect for women play into the definition? How much respect? In what ways?

Those questions related to the themes that came out in my research on Playboy. There were seemingly many identities offered up to young women as well as young men in the 1970s, but the reality is there were strict binaries. You were a feminist, or you enjoyed being married and a stay-at-home mom. You were a misogynist, or you were a Phil Donahue-style ally of the women’s movement. I wanted to explore the outliers. The feminists who Gloria Steinem didn’t approve of because they posed for Playboy. A young police officer who grows to understand the subtleties in crimes against women, and the ways that culture was actively reassessing those crimes.

Nightswimming is available to preorder from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, or directly from my publisher High Frequency Press.

About the novel:

Paterson, New Jersey, 1979: Jamie Palmieri is an up-and-coming patrol officer, three years out of the academy and frustrated with his slow rise to detective. That all changes one frigid night in January, when a double homicide at a local bar leaves the owner and a young woman dead. In the wake of the Rubin “Hurricane” Carter proceedings and the city’s lingering distrust for the police, Jamie is told to expect a “no one saw a thing” investigation. But as Jamie traces a series of small leads, he’s sent on a path where the tables turn suddenly—with the still-unknown killer now stalking Jamie and the people he’s closest to.

A classic police procedural charged with the social turbulence of the 1970s.

Upcoming event:

I’ll be reading, along with my cohort from High Frequency Press, on April 26^th, in the Red Room at the KGB Bar (NYC)

This Week’s Recommended Readings

Never thought I’d get the generous following I’ve been blessed with. For my newest subscribers and followers, it all started here with Playmate Perfect.