Mintwood Place is a delightfully fresh version of the noir tradition, offering the reader a contemporary "Casablanca" in Washington, DC. The book's narrator, Renaissance man Joe Green, has plenty to say about love, politics and the male psyche in this page-turning romantic suspense. Joe runs a bookstore and a bistro and painfully navigates a modern divorce while the Senate Intelligence Committee investigates his relationship with Cosmo, a protégé who has recently been paroled after serving five years in prison for the ambiguous killing of a local black youth. Green, a proud Jersey boy, can all at once relax by watching his tortoises, hand out liberal advice to his three teenagers, and pack serious heat. He is a twenty-first-century American male, if ever there was one.