Maxine Kenneth

Maxine Kenneth is the writing team of Maxine Schnall and Ken Salikof

Ken says:

I am an award-winning screenwriter (for Ernest Hemingway Slept Here) turned novelist. I am also a special contributor to the New York Daily News, write book reviews and articles for Publishers Weekly, am a judge for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition, and have worked as a studio reader, manuscript editor for bestselling authors and screenwriting consultant. Along with a collaborator, I have embarked on a series of novels about the young Jackie Bouvier, long before she was Mrs. JFK and the First Lady of the Country. Based on a 1951 letter in the JFK Library revealing her possible employment with the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency, I have imagined Jackie as a neophyte CIA agent in the early fifties, having glamorous, dangerous adventures in Paris, Havana and other exciting locations. The next book in the series, Spy in a Little Black Dress will be published by Grand Central Publishing on October 2nd (with a really spectacular cover), and the first one, Paris to Die For, can still be found on bookstore shelves. Both, of course, are available as ebooks. The novels have been an absolute joy to write and I hope the reader will have a similar experience reading about Jackie at a pivotal but little written about moment in her life.

Maxine says:

I started writing back in the 60s with my first book, MY HUSBAND THE DOCTOR, chronicling the funny side of being married to an ob-gyn. Next came THE BROADBELTERS, my racy novel about the soft porn book biz, optioned for films by Stanley Kubrick. After my marriage broke up and I founded a hotline called Wives Self Help, my book based on the hotline calls, YOUR MARRIAGE, was published. Excerpts printed in Woman's Day led to my becoming a contributing editor with the magazine and the host of my own CBS daily radio show. In 1982, Clarkson Potter published my book LIMITS: A SEARCH FOR NEW VALUES, a study of the cultural effects of the sexual revolution, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. After I remarried, my book, EVERY WOMAN CAN BE ADORED established my reputation as a relationship guru and led to six appearances on Oprah. In 1985, my younger daughter Rona, a beautiful, gifted, award-winning journalist was seriously brain-injured in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. Her courageous battle to reestablish her life after this tragedy and hundreds of stories of other people who came back from losses large and small inspired my book WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU MAKES YOU STRONGER (Perseus, 2002 and DaCapo, 2003; United Kingdom, Spain, Taiwan, Korea, and Lebanon). It's available in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle. To find out more, please visit my website: http://www.maxineschnall.com.

After answering Ken Salikof's ad in Craig's List seeking a collaborator, I teamed up with him to write PARIS TO DIE FOR, the first in a series of spy novels with Jackie Kennedy as an unofficial CIA agent. The idea was inspired by an authentic letter written by 21-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier in the JFK Library stating that the CIA had offered her a job and she was going to take it. From there, our imaginations were off and running--and so was a whole new Jackie to 1950s Paris for an adventure filled with death-defying exploits, foreign intrigue, romance, and hobnobbing with famous celebrities. Grand Central published the book in 2011 on July 28, Jackie's birthday. The sequel released in 2012, SPY in a LITTLE BLACK DRESS, takes Jackie to Cuba were she meets a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro. Both books are available on Amazon in paperback and e-book formats.

On November 24, 2020, PRISON CAMP CONFIDENTIAL, my latest book, a WWII novel inspired by true events in a prisoner of war camp in Missouri for thousands of Italian soldiers captured overseas. will be available for pre-order on Amazon. Co-authored with Dean Winstead, a military veteran, the novel tells the story of Reno Cova, a 23-year-old POW who falls madly in love with Katy McNeely, a beautiful American civilian worker in the prison camp whose father developed a prized experimental aircraft called the Ascender. Reno and Katy carry on their clandestine relationship in constant fear of being caught and having Reno sent to another camp for "fraternizing" until they are kidnapped and held hostage by a trio of violent anti-American Blackshirt escapees engaged in an espionage plot involving the Ascender. At gunpoint by day and tied up at night, the terrified hostages endure a hair-raising trek through the forest, deepening the love between them. At war's end, Reno reluctantly has to go back to Italy, vowing to return to America and marry Katy...but a bizarre twist of fate intervenes. It is only as an old man that Reno returns to Missouri, hoping to find Katy again and put his lifelong regrets to rest. This wartime story of young lovers torn apart by an emotional landmine will resonate with anyone who has ever suffered the loss of a love through forces beyond the lovers' control and has finally found redemption. PRISON CAMP CONFIDENTIAL also reveals how well the prisoners in this little known camp were treated by our American military, a typical situation for the hundreds of thousands of POWs in our midst. I hope you'll enjoy reading it!