A.E.S. O'Neill

After several decades of a highly successful New York marketing career, film school,

professional writing, public speaking, and travel blogging experience, Alfred O’Neill

(THAT’S ME!) has always been a collector of stories and dreamed of writing novels.

But it took the tragedy of losing his wife to cancer — and homage to their love — to

push him to finally get 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 is based on a true story. It was highly reviewed

by Kirkus, among others. Told to O’Neill by his father years before, the plot centers on

a robbery at a mob-owned bank and the violent consequences that follow. Reviewers

were torn between which they liked more: the wit and banter of the romance between

Ginger and Alby or the dark and evil mundanity of the killer, Jagger.

Even Climate Change Can’t Stop Love and Murder, Vol. 2: Paying the Price continues

the adventures of Ginger and Alby, as they fall in love while always immersed in

troubles that just seem to find them. With their search for love at the story’s core, they

face the realities of their journey crossing America in 2026, including insurrectionists,

white supremacists, and a hitman they believed was dead. This story of the forces of

evil and good, and love and murder culminates in a violent climax at Tuzigoot, the

national Pueblo monument in Arizona. Unfolding in Vol. 2 is the unveiling of Ginger’s

dark past and a close-call look at how the destruction caused by climate chaos impacts

many of the current societal and personal divisions — two themes that will continue as

parts of the upcoming Vol. 3 of this trilogy.

Funeral of Lies, a stand-alone psychological thriller, is O’Neill’s newest published

novel and like Vol. 1 of the Love and Murder series is also based on a true story —

though heavily fictionalized. After being banished by his family for a dubious crime, a

man returns home years later to help his uncle run for mayor, only to fall deep into a

mire of dirty politics and family lies.

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 drive 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.

O’Neill is currently outlining a novel entitled Guilt, also based on a true story of his father’s,

this one about his federal trial court case and conviction and its aftermath. In addition, author

O’Neill is in the plotting-out stage of a cozy detective series entitled The Blow-Ins about an

American couple who is forced to hide out in a small Irish town. Between navigating the quirks

of the Irish and the couple’s current status as complete strangers, AKA blow-ins, trouble just

seems to find them!