The Twelfth Card

Author’s Note

Authors are only as good as the friends and fellow professionals around them, and I’m extremely fortunate to be surrounded by a truly wonderful ensemble: Will and Tina Anderson, Alex Bonham, Louise Burke, Robby Burroughs, Britt Carlson, Jane Davis, Julie Reece Deaver, Jamie Hodder-Williams, John Gilstrap, Cahty Gleason, Carolyn Mays, Emma Longhurst, Dianal Mackay, Tara Parsons, Carolyn Reidy, David Rosenthal, Marysue Rucci, Deborah Schneider, Vivienne Schuster, Brigitte Smith, and Kevin Smith.

Special thanks, as always, to Madelyn Warcholik.

For those readers browsing through guide books in hopes of taking a walking tour of Gallows Heights, you can stop searching. While my depiction of life in nineteenth-century Manhattan is otherwise accurate and there were indeed a number of such villages on the Upper West Side that ultimately were swallowed up by the city’s urban sprawl, Gallows Heights and the nefarious doings I describe there are solely creations of my imagination. The eerie name served my purpose, and I figured that Boss Tweed and his cronies at Tammany Hall wouldn’t mind if I laid a few more crimes at their feet. After all, as Thompson Boyd would say, “It’s only a question of where you put the decimal point.”