Local Authors Probe Murder, Relationships And Genocide

A thriller set on the Outer Cape, a beach read set in Orleans and a novel following an immigrant’s voyage are all new to local bookstores.

 Paul Kemprecos of Dennis Port, the best-selling author of the Aristotle “Soc” Socarides series, has rereleased his first thriller with a female protagonist — Abi Vickers, an art historian and gallery owner who finds a clue to a World War II mystery in a sketch by Edward Hopper.

 Kemprecos originally released “Killing Icarus” (Thalassa Imprints, 2025) in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic when many readers may have overlooked the book. For this edition Kemprecos redid the cover art, expanded his author’s note on the book’s historic background, and added a bonus 17-page short story called “Crazy Jack.” This story, Kemprecos’s third, is set at the Chatham Fish Pier (looking much as it did in the 1980s) and narrated by “Soc,” who is himself a fisherman, diver and private investigator.

In the 1980s Kemprecos lived near the fish pier and wrote a popular fishing column. “The years I spent talking to fishermen about their age-old craft or going out on their boats and popping seasick pills came in handy when I went to write my Socarides stories and made the lead character a fisherman.” “Soc” has featured in 10 novels over three decades.

 In “Killing Icarus,” Abi’s life went on the skids after her husband ran off with his secretary, leaving her in debt. When she is offered a job and the use of a Truro cottage where there was once a German-American gliding school, she jumps at the chance. But her sojourn is anything but restful as she discovers a secret hidden in an Edward Hopper sketch and confronts a shady German journalist and hired killers.

 As in all of Kemprecos’s mysteries, the Cape forms a beautiful setting.

 “Killing Icarus” is available through local bookstores.

Author Judy Lannon’s new novel, her third, also takes full advantage of the Cape Cod setting. “Callahan’s Cottage” (Outer Beach Press, 2025) is about three lifelong friends in their 30s who have reunited at a family cottage in Orleans for the first time in five years. Can their friendship survive the vacation?

Lannon’s 2022 debut novel “Nine Days” tackled what it’s like when your elderly parent is nearing death. Her second novel, “The Making of Genevieve,” released in 2024, follows a plucky woman overcoming many tribulations from her teen years to death. All three of her novels have won awards.

Lannon knows the Cape well as she grew up in Randolph and spent her summers at her grandparents’ house on Bank Street in Harwich Port. A resident of Orleans, she has lived on the Cape fulltime since 1974.

Lannon tells the friend’s stories in “Callahan’s Cottage” from the alternating points of view of Ellenor, Emma and Esme. While each woman is successful in her own field — they are a baker, a professional photographer and an author — each also has a secret unhappiness eating at her. Chapters open with an apt quotation that is intended to hint at what is to come in the chapter.

Cape Cod Life’s “best of” issue included “Callahan’s Cottage” on a list of “cool reads for hot days.” Lannon is currently writing a sequel. “Callahan’s Cottage” is available at Where the Sidewalk Ends Books in Chatham, The Brewster Book Store in Brewster, Below the Brine Bookshop and Cape Roots Market in Harwich Port, and the Frying Pan Gallery and Weekend in Orleans.

 Judith Gamsey of Chatham has released her touching debut novel “Cymbals: An Armenian Holocaust Survivor’s Story.” This is the story of an Armenian immigrant, Garabed Vartician, whose entire family was massacred during the Armenian genocide of 1915/1916 when an estimated one million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed. With “Cymbals,” Gamsey hopes to “bring to light a genocide… that was not recognized by our country until President Biden” did so in 2021.

When he arrives in New York, Garabed is welcomed and aided by the Armenian community, and it is there that he meets another young immigrant, Berig. The two travel to a Watertown rooming house. Eventually they co-own a bakery, but when the Great Depression hits orders drop. In the 1940s they partner in a different kind of enterprise — the Seferian Cymbal Company. Yes, they produce cymbals based on a secret formula bequeathed to Berig by his father. Along the way both men marry and start families.

Gamsey grew up in Watertown and based her story on the real-life stories of a teacher and musician named Alan Varteresian, whom her husband met at an Oriental rug auction. The fictional Garabed was based on Varteresian’s father.

Varteresian was “an incredible storyteller, and his spellbinding stories of being in America were remarkable, beyond belief,” Gamsey says. “These tales of the cymbal making were told in whispers. I was amazed at what his father endured.”

Gamsey urged Varteresian to write a memoir, but he said no one would read it, so Gamsey wrote the book.

Gamsey, who began work on the novel about 20 years ago, will sign copies of “Cymbals” at Yellow Umbrella Books in Chatham on Friday, Aug. 29 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.