Author Taps Her Roots for Debut Novel

Books don’t get much more ‘local’ than today’s debut novel "Night Machines" by Kia Heavey, wife of Greenwich’s new Deputy Police Chief Jim Heavey, although much of the action takes place next door  in Stamford and in the fictional Town of Vale. Vale is described as being another 15 miles up the Merritt Parkway, and reminiscent in some ways of – say – Trumbull but a bit more rural.

Elsewhere in Greenwich Patch is an interview with Kia, so I won’t belabor some similarities she has with her heroine Maggie Moore.  Maggie is married to Rowan, a detective with the Stamford PD, and loving mother of Hazel, aged 5, and Charlie, a toddler. 

As her adventure begins, Maggie is looking for a part-time job to ease back into the working world she left when the children arrived.  An alumna of Columbia’s Barnard College with some experience in advertising copywriting, she landed one at a live-wire pharmaceutical outfit in one of those office parks below the Merritt. It was called NarcoDynamics, and their goldmine was a sleeping aid called Anadreme, invented by the company’s handsome, charismatic and single founder, Dr. Cambien Cuthbert.

It quickly appeared that Cuthbert was a former nerd and high school classmate of Maggie - she didn’t recognize him but he definitely recognized her. Add one more complication: a sensational child-murder case in an upscale Stamford neighborhood - what some homicide squads call a ‘red ball’ case, a top priority to be solved yesterday if not sooner. Right when Maggie was starting at NarcoDynamics, this case absorbed almost all Detective Rowan’s waking hours and absolutely all his energy. When he was home he was short-tempered and distant.

Well, it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes, or even Dr. Ruth, to figure out that Maggie is going to begin thinking about handsome, rich Cuthbert who seems very interested in her. While she does nothing in a physical way, Cuthbert becomes literally the man of her dreams; she fantasizes about him at night, and has a sort of dream-affair with him. I have to say I envied Maggie this ability to ‘dream to order;’ if I had it, I would surely have called up many safaris with Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep) in 1920s "Africa," or adventures with the 1960s Mrs. Emma Peel (Diana Rigg when we were both a lot younger) thwarting dastardly deeds as the third, American “Avenger.”

Well, so much for “wandering unchecked in a garden of bright images.” To get back to Maggie, while her dalliance with Cuthbert stays firmly in her dreams, it becomes very complicated when the man of her make-believe dalliance, also her rich, powerful boss, reciprocates her infatuation but in real life. Cuthbert is not at all accustomed to being denied or thwarted in what he wants, and it turns out he has wanted Maggie very badly since his nerd-phase in high school when she was pleasant rather than mocking him. It goes far beyond the conventional wisdom: “Be nice to nerds; you’ll probably end up working for one.”

It is unfair to the reader to say much more and spoil the unexpected denouement, as to which I will only say that I did not even expect part of it until two-thirds of the way through "Night Machines" and I didn’t suspect all of it until the very end.

I enjoyed the book, all the more because the author avoids the common trap of so many novelists, writing about things they know nothing about .(If you want to see what I mean, look at many of the ‘cop’ shows and almost all the ‘spy’ shows on television). As you can see from her interview elsewhere in today’s “Patch” she sticks to what she knows, not just as a successful cop’s wife but even slipping in a bit of her Greek ancestral heritage.