Welcome to the Website of Author Larry Maness
Larry Maness is the author of two books of plays and six novels (the last of which was published in 2023). 3 Plays was introduced by Pulitzer prize-winner, William Inge. His plays War Rabbit and Bailey both premiered in New York City at The American Theatre of Actors.
His first novel, Nantucket Revenge, is called “The best beach read since Jaws” according to Florida Crime Writers author Steve Glassman. His second novel, A Once Perfect Place, is included in the Literature of Social Change collection at Duke University. Strangler, his third novel featuring Private Investigator Jake Eaton, is a Detective Book Club selection. The Voice of God, his fourth novel, is called by Rosemary Herbert, author of The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing, “an assured production that snares the reader from start to finish.” Read excerpt from The Voice of God
Chapter 1
When the church caught fire, rumors spread like so many sparks in the night sky: Father Jerry set it himself. Hadn’t faulty wiring popped up in one sermon after another over the past months? He could build a sermon around anything, but he chose old wires and imperfect circuits to prepare the congregation for what was coming. It’s clear as a spring morning now—Father Jerry wasn’t raising more money to fix what ailed the hundred-year-old building. No, he was raising money for his own personal use once he caught the Provincetown bus to Boston, then onto Logan Airport where two tickets to Rome waited for him. He burned the church to destroy evidence that would lead to his conviction.
But, the tickets were never picked up, and Alitalia’s Flight 725 left without Father Jerry and his companion. Where they got to, no one knows. Who Father Jerry was traveling with, no one is telling.
The silence only fueled the rumors: The airplane tickets were a hoax, a planted diversion designed to perplex. Father Jerry was as Irish as a Dublin pub; he wouldn’t run to Italy. He’d go back home and disappear among all the Dublin Dunns. Or, maybe South America. How long could you live in Argentina on three hundred thousand dollars? If, indeed, that was the correct amount stolen from the church. Father Jerry didn’t keep all the money in the bank and what records he did keep burned in the fire. Gossipers started out at eighty thousand stolen and like bids shouted out at an auction, stopped at half a million before people came to their senses. Where would Father Jeremiah Dunn, the parish priest of St. Peter the Apostle in Provincetown, Massachusetts, lay his hands on that kind of money? It couldn’t have come only from the congregation. They gave small amounts weekly and willingly but nothing close to three hundred thousand in the six years Father Jerry urged their generosity.
Maybe it wasn’t money that drove him to overload the wiring, feel the walls heat until flames shot through the roof, making sure the old wooden church could not be saved before he called the fire department. Maybe at fifty he’d fallen in love with someone other than God. Maybe a woman captured his kind heart. Or, maybe the suspicions about his sexual preference were true, and he gave in to a man. Or, maybe, like the tickets to Rome, that second seat on the airplane was also meant to cloud clarity. There was no one else. There was only Father Jerry who had vanished with the money like the smoke mixing with the sparks that rose into the night’s sky.
Maness lives on the south shore of Massachusetts with his wife, Marianne, known as “The Cookie Lady” in some parts of the world.
Twenty-five years from hardcover to paperback and e-book: Speaking Volumes, a traditional publisher of many New York Times bestselling authors, is for the first time publishing in paperback all three Jake Eaton mystery novels—Nantucket Revenge, A Once Perfect Place, and Strangler. In addition, Speaking Volumes has reissued The Voice of God, the novel featuring Adilino Cardosa set in Provincetown.
In 2021 Speaking Volumes published Maness’s The Last Perdoux, which brings together an infamous Italian art collector, the German officer responsible for looting prized World War II collections, and Theo Perdoux, who’s searching for the Rembrandt stolen from his family. Their pasts bring all three together in a tiny hilltown near the Italian Riviera. What follows rips apart one family and brings together another.
After the success of The Last Perdoux, Maness is back with a second Theo R. Perdoux mystery. In The Perfect Crime, based on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum robbery, Maness recreates the heist and goes on to connect it to a famous Italian family living in Rome. As he did in his previous Boston-based novel, Strangler, Maness again weaves history and fiction into a satisfying read.
As Dave Daniel, author of Beach Time, wrote in an advanced review, “Larry Maness is back, doing what he does so well: reimaging a Boston mystery. In The Perfect Crime, his focus is the Gardner Museum’s robbery that has baffled authorities for years. It’s not until Theo Perdoux, famed investigator of stolen art pieces, enters the mix that a solution seems at hand.
“Globe-hopping through mazes of information and misinformation, and a cast of memorable characters, the novel blazes a cryptic trail that leads ever deeper into the vortex before driving to a startling, satisfying climax.”
More about Larry Maness from an interview in the “Writing Itself” podcast of broadcaster and writer Sean McElhiney: