Coincidence

What a great romp through the assassination of JFK! "Coincidence" is not so much a counterfactual novel - like Philip Roth's "Plot Against America," where Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt for president - as an "extra-factual" novel.

The narrator is, surprise, Joseph Kennedy Jr., the Brahmin lawyer who died in 1944 when his Navy bomber exploded, but who talks like he's spent time in the hereafter with raunchy hipsters. Joe's rat-a-tat narration offers 40 years of name-dropping revelations (Gloria Swanson, Gloria Pinchot Meyers, Maria Callas) as he digs into the assassination of his younger brother. Joe takes the reader between the sheets, inside Jackie's spat with her sister, and through the dirty deals, mob bargains, and rivalries that lead to multiple bullets flying in Dealey Plaza. - Linda Lee, journalist, "The New York Times" and author of "One by One."

Coincidence is a bold and deftly constructed novel that reimagines one of America's most calamitous times, the assignation of JFK. However, this clever narrative contains impressive originality. Guided by a cheeky and irreverent narrator who speaks directly to the reader throughout the account, the story unveils the hidden threads and private compulsions that history never recorded. The result is a narrative that feels both fresh, yet reflective of the lives whose choices converge on that fateful day in Dallas. From Joseph P. Kennedy and Gloria Swanson to Jackie Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and the young Lee Harvey Oswald, each character moves through the story with vivid authenticity. Their passions, secrets and betrayals form a series of events that blurs the line between truth and deception. Consequently, readers are invited to reconsider what we think we know about what actually occurred on November 22, 1963.- Bill Rowe, Author, Elingale Trilogy