Sometimes there are voices you just can’t let go. Stories that won’t release you.

My next novel is exactly that. It began with a song by an anonymous 17^th century Italian composer—a song so beautiful that I had to pull my car off the road the first time I heard it, because I couldn’t possibly both drive and listen. In response I created the “anonymous” composer in my author-mind. Gave him a name—Nicolo Gallo—ambitions, a personality. Then I set him in the Papal Court in the era of the Barberini . . . In a Rome that valued power above all else, even piety.

There Nicolo met the real-life soprano Leonora Baroni, and the real-life impetuous, superstar castrato, Marc’Antonio Pasqualini. The three swiftly became bound by music and much more.

Their story became The Cardinal’s Nightingale.

Is my soon to release novel set in a commercially popular era? No. Will I ever be sorry that I wrote it? No.

Because The Cardinal’s Nightingale is the book of my soul. A novel I love more than anything else I’ve written. A novel I am so invested in that I used to text my husband before any plane I was on took off saying, “if my flight crashes and I die, don’t let The Cardinal’s Nightingale die with me.”

Are you going to love it? I can’t say. But I do. Unapologetically.

I hope you will give it a try. The release date will be announced soon.