D. M. Pirrone

D.M. Pirrone is the nom de plume of Diane Piron-Gelman, who works as a freelance editor when she isn't writing. Her latest novel, upcoming in late September, is the Prohibition-era historical thriller PRACTICE TO DECEIVE.

It's 1923, and Chicago society girl Emma McGrath desperately wants to escape her frivolous life. From rescuing wounded soldiers on the battlefields of the Great War to planning charity balls and angling for a husband? No, thank you. Plus, she's worried about her twin brother, Jack, whose gambling and womanizing can't erase the memory of those same soldiers he tried but failed to save. They both need a sense of purpose again, or they'll go crazy. Emma has the perfect solution: Hang out their shingle as private detectives. They adore Sherlock Holmes and that marvelous new crime writer, Agatha Christie, and nosing into things is right up their alley, so why not give it a whirl? But their first case, finding a missing speakeasy singer, proves tougher than they bargained for when the singer turns up dead...and Jack is the prime suspect.

Pirrone's crime fiction debut, the standalone suspense novel NO LESS IN BLOOD, was published by Five Star/Cengage in 2011. She is also the author of the Hanley & Rivka Mysteries, originally published by Allium Press of Chicago. Book 1 in the series, SHALL WE NOT REVENGE (2014), takes place during the harsh winter of early 1872. As Chicago digs out from the ashes of the Great Fire, rookie Irish detective Francis (Frank) Hanley solves the brutal murder of a rabbi, with an unexpected assist from the dead man's daughter, Rivka, in a case that forces a reckoning with an enemy from his own checkered past.

Book 2, FOR YOU WERE STRANGERS (2015), begins with a former Civil War soldier found slain in his bedroom with his own bayonet. The murder exposes secrets best left buried--among them a Black man passing for White, an 1864 conspiracy to take over Chicago that still threatens powerful men, and a surviving Confederate guerrilla fighter unable to deal with a world turned upside down. Hanley and Rivka race against time to solve the killing before the turbulent events of the recent past can claim more victims.

The Civil War still haunts Chicago's residents in Book 3, PROMISES TO THE DEAD (2020). What begins for Detective Hanley as the simple case of a missing railroad clerk quickly escalates into something much more sinister. Ezra Hayes, who has made a daring escape from forced servitude on a Louisiana sugar plantation, brings to Chicago proof of nefarious doings in the South that implicates the missing clerk’s employer, a major shipper of sugar. As Hanley untangles the railroad’s role in the clerk’s disappearance, Rivka Kelmansky faces a personal struggle. Her brother is pressuring her to marry a young man from her tight-knit Jewish community, but she dreams of forging a new life with Hanley. When her mulatto sister-in-law, Ada, is wrongly accused of murder, Rivka turns to Hanley for help. Hanley and Rivka fight opposition on multiple fronts to uncover the shocking truth, with Ada's life at risk if they fail.

A Chicago native, history buff and avid reader of just about anything, Ms. Piron-Gelman is a longtime member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. She lives in Oak Park with her husband Stephen, her still-at-home son Isaac, and two African Sideneck turtles (Yertle and Lawrence).