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“James Allaire is a retired psychologist who lives with his wife in Winona, Minnesota. He is working on another Brian Kane and Maria Valencia mystery.” So says the bio snippet on the back cover of Costly Grace—hardly satisfying to those who will read the novel. Here’s a sketch of some lifetime experiences and influences that shaped me in the writing of Costly Grace. (I’ll skip the boring details.) As a young man, I entered the seminary to study for the Catholic priesthood where my love of philosophy, theology, and the spiritual life developed. I left the seminary inspired by Vatican Council II and the new role envisioned for lay Catholic Christians. I married, raised a family, studied psychology, moved back to my hometown in Minnesota, and worked as a psychologist, and later as a software and web developer. When I wrote, it was essays for local consumption about spirituality and social justice, serious stuff, non-fiction. After helping found two homeless shelters in the Catholic Worker tradition I co-authored the book Praying With Dorothy Day (Word Among Us Press, 1995). Fiction was not on the horizon. In January 2002, happenstance had me in Boston where I underwent emergency surgery. While recovering, I immersed myself in the Spenser mystery novels by Robert B. Parker, partly because I was staying only three blocks from Spenser’s fictional office. Great fun. At the same time, every morning the front page of the Boston Globe was ablaze with horrific stories about the clergy sex abuse scandal and cover-up in the Catholic Church. When I returned to Minnesota, I helped start a chapter of Voice of the Faithful, a lay group trying to come to grips with the scandal and bring change to the Church. Part of my work as a psychologist involved work with victims of sex abuse (not by clergy) that gave me insight into the depth of the harm done to victims. I began reading widely in the mystery genre: Raymond Chandler, Rex Stout, P.D. James, Tony Hillerman, Elizabeth George, Sue Grafton, and fifty more mystery writers. During a three-year period, I explored my unconscious life with a Jungian analyst and discovered a fiction writer inside my psyche. When a story idea emerged, I knew it would be a murder mystery. I grew up and now live near the Mississippi River and that explains the choice of setting.
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Available in Winona, MN, at Paperbacks & Pieces and The Book Shelf.
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