Alfred O’Neill grew up going to private school paid for by a mobster father, rocks out to the Grateful Dead and Beethoven for inspiration, reads comics to never lose his inner-child, and disregards most of society’s rules—except for the importance of decency, empathy and humanity. Roll it all up? He gathers and tells stories.
After several decades of a highly successful New York marketing career, film school, professional writing, public speaking, and travel blogging experience, Alfred O’Neill finally got around to writing novels.
His debut novel, Even a Pandemic Can’t Stop Love and Murder is a romance/thriller that takes place in the mid-2020s and based on a true story and was highly reviewed by Kirkus, among others. Told to him by his father years ago, the plot centers on a robbery at a mob-owned bank and the violent consequences that followed.
Even Climate Change Can’t Stop Love and Murder, Vol. 2: Paying the Price continues the adventures of Ginger and Alby, falling in love while always immersed in troubles that just seem to find them. With their search for love at its core, the story faces the reality of crossing America in 2026, fraught with insurrectionists, white supremacists, and a hit man they believe is dead. It is a story of love, a road trip West, forces of evil and good, love and murder culminating in a violent climax at the national pueblo monument, Tuzigoot, Arizona. We learn of Ginger’s dark past, and experience the destruction of climate chaos and how it can affect many of our current societal and personal divisions.
From a childhood marked by wiretaps, mob dinners, and FBI agents following his father, O’Neill learned to understand the complexities of love, crime, and human behavior that drives right and wrong, good and evil. Inspired by the snappy patter of 1930s talkies, and the mundane, ever present danger of the Pandemic Era, he used this story to show what he believes are the major themes in human behavior: the interplay of light and dark, of love and death, of choices made and lived with. Despite all of his own life’s more challenging lessons, O’Neill knows that love will always win.
A subsequent volume in the Even Love and Murder series—Checking Out—is already in the works.
