In the Cocoanut Grove

This novel is about finding love, losing it, recapturing it and then trying to pay homage to it. The novel takes place during Prohibition and the Golden Age of Hollywood. It features the actress Gloria Swanson, Joseph P. Kennedy (the father of JFK), the Cocoanut Grove night club fire of 1942, and a man and a woman who never became famous.

We witness their dance of love, in all its various emotional quick steps, pauses and separations. The music stops when Marie Lankin and Thomas Danielson visit the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston.

For Lankin and Danielson, love and memory are completely entwined, becoming as powerful and overwhelming as the smoke and flames inside the Cocoanut Grove that night.

Their story comes full circle when a boy who had witnessed Lankin setting fire to a ruined boat, decides years later to shoot a movie about Lankin who had offered him mysterious glimpses into his life as a whiskey runner during Prohibition.

Now an old man, Lankin secretly observes the filming and comments, ‘The boy got a lot right, some things wrong. But I congratulate him. If I'm still alive when his movie comes out, I will go see it. I will laugh and cry with the others if it is that kind of movie. It should be that kind of movie. Though they don't really make that kind of movie any more.'

For the reader, the novel is that kind of movie, a front row experience of an amazing yet realistic love story. Lurking over it all is Joseph Kennedy who continues to fascinate both as a millionaire businessman and the father of JFK.