I met  Judge Jeanine Pirro several months ago and she told me that she was looking for someone to help her write a novel about her early days as the first female prosecutor in Westchester County,  just outside of New York City. Shortly after Jeanine was hired in 1978, she created one of the first Domestic Violence Units in

the country. She specialized in prosecuting spousal abuse cases at a time when it was not illegal in some states for a husband to beat his wife. After calling attention to domestic violence, Jeanine targeted pedophiles, by creating the first sting operation in the nation to catch sexual predators. (This was decades before NBC’s Dateline Series: To Catch A Predator.)  Jeanine later was elected the first woman judge in Westchester County and eventually ran unsuccessfully for the New York Attorney General’s job. Since leaving the bench and politics, she has been a regular on television, hosting her own FOX prime time program, Justice With Judge Jeanine.

I was hooked the moment I met Jeanine. She is a smart, no-nonsense, tireless legal champion for underdogs. She also has a great sense of humor and smile. I  liked the idea of fictionalizing actual cases and I especially was interested in helping write a novel grounded in the 1970s about a feisty, female prosecutor.

Jeanine and I quickly came up with a main character — Dani Fox — who is (not surprisingly) a lot like Jeanine. The title of the first book is  SLY FOX , which will debut in July and is now available for order. A second novel, CLEVER FOX, will be published later.

This is not a ghostwritten book where a FOX TV News celebrity simply attaches his/her name to a professionally written novel.  Jeanine selected the cases  and we worked collaboratively on the manuscript with her pouring over every word.  Because Jeanine was so involved, SLY FOX gives readers an intimate and insider’s glimpse at what she experienced as a young prosecutor when women were not welcomed in courtrooms.  The reviews (printed below) have been good.

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Have you ever wondered if those amazing spy gadgets that you’ve seen in James Bond movies are real? Do operatives working for the Brit’s  MI-6, the CIA, and the Russian SVR (formerly known as the KGB) really have access to sleek sports cars with ejecting passenger seats and wristwatches with hidden laser beam torches? 

My friend, H. Keith Melton, owns the largest collection of spy artifacts in the world – more than ten thousand items. Many of the 007 inspired spy gizmos on display at the International Spy Museum in Washington D.C. are on loan from his personal collection. 

Melton recently decided to show off some of his most prized items in a traveling exhibit called “Spy: The Secret World of Espionage”  which opened in mid-May in Discovery Times Square in Manhattan.

Featured in his traveling show is the trick umbrella that Bulgarian intelligence operatives used to shoot a pellet that contained ricin into the leg of Georgi Ivanov Markov,  a dissident writer, while he was waiting for a bus in London. The so-called “deadliest poison” known to man was sealed by wax in a tiny pellet and was released when Markov’s body temperature melted the seal.

The traveling collection also contains a CIA manufactured robotic dragonfly, the smallest operational submarine used in World War II, a robot catfish and pigeon made for spying and a pick axe that Soviet Ramon Mercader drove into the skull of Leon Trotsky  in Coyoacan, a borough of Mexico City, in 1940.

When he was preparing the exhibit, which will tour 10 cities during the next several years, Keith asked me if I would share some of the artifacts that I collected while doing research for my books, Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Jr. Spy Ring; Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames; and Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War.

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