01940 Summer 2021

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GANDOLFO, continued from page 6
To anyone who might want to start
writing novels, she provides one bit of
caution: “This is a very tough way to
make a buck.”
“Tasting Death” is the fourth
installment in what Gandolfo thought
would be a trilogy — with No. 5 in the
making, too. She wrote “Tasting Death” as
an homage to her grandfather, who was in
the food business. At the time he died —
when Gandolfo’s father was 2 years old —
he owned the largest import-export store
in the North End of Boston.
“My brother and I talk about our family
all the time,” she said. “I’d have loved to
have met (my grandfather). My father’s
whole family was in the food business. They
worked very hard. They were up at 4 every
morning, and put in long days.”
Gandolfo uses all of her environmental
influences in her books. For example,
“Tasting Death” concerns organized crime
infiltrating her fictional North Shore town
of Bromfield in the 1980s to distribute
drugs “in an ingenious manner,” which has
something to do with the food business —
she won’t say what.
“Bromfield,” she says, “is a combination
of several North Shore towns, like
The cover of Jane Gandolfo's "Tasting Death."
Lynnfield, Marblehead and Peabody. This
all takes place on fishing boats, and there
are references to Beverly Airport.”
The book’s heroes — Veronica
Howard and Harry Hunt — are
undercover FBI agents who appear in all
the books. The couple lives in Boston, but
Veronica has a store in Bromfield that
sells antiques.
“All the stories involve antiques,
vintage clothing, antique jewelry,”
Gandolfo said. “That’s my marketing
niche for writing books.
“You have to find what nobody else
has written about,” she said. “There are
10,000 books a week printed in the
United States. Probably more than that,
but that’s the figure they throw out. Most
of them are self-published, as are mine.
I had an agent look at my stuff, and had
a couple of publishers who rejected me.
They told me to come back in five years. I
was 74. I didn’t have five years.
“Unless you’re one of the big guys, you
don’t have a chance in this business,” she
said. “It’s really tough. If you want to be
in print, you have to do it yourself. That’s
why Amazon is so big. Everybody who
wants to write has to realize that unless
they have a New York Times best seller
under their belt, they don’t have a chance.”
Lest anybody think self-publishing is
an inexpensive proposition, think again.
“You have to set aside a large chunk
of money and time, and you have to have
computer knowledge,” she said. “That
was the hardest part for me. There are no
more galleys. In my day, everything was
galleys (proofed pages). I’m an old-timer.
That’s how we did it.”
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