Jigsaw: Beginnings follows a group of students on a trip to Italy who stumble into the secrets of a WWII teleportation experiment, forcing them to unravel a conspiracy where history and the present collide. What were some sources that informed this book’s development?

Excellent question. I did a great deal of research on the Italian Resistance Movement, OSS espionage and Holocaust rescue efforts at the time and general area, Mussolini’s Puppet Government in Salo following his rescue by the Nazis in 1943, and overtures to get Spain to join the war on the Axis side. I felt these were neglected parts of history that needed greater exploration. I also have visited Voltri on two occasions when I was younger. My Great Aunt and Uncle (my Grandmother’s brother) lived there and I wanted to make this a quasi-tribute to that side of the family. I also drew from personal experiences and other people I know like my parents, grandmother, siblings, and friends to fill in the character development. The names of the student’s characters came from children that attended the charter school I once owned.

Colonel Angelo and Professor Klein are morally complex characters. How did you develop their motivations?

Klein represents that part of history where Conservative Jewish Palestinians had, at first, a productive relationship with Mussolini’s Government in the 1920s and 1930s. As Italy’s government became more openly Anti Semitic in its subservience to Hitler, Jews who thought Mussolini had backstabbed them were more prevalent. That is how I developed Klein. I do not want to say much about Angelo here because he has an arc that readers would see in the second and third books in the series, Warheads and Full Circle and I do not want to spoil that.

The Italian settings feel incredibly vivid. Did you visit these locations, or was your research primarily historical?

As mentioned in the first question, I have visited Voltri and Genoa several times. While I based some of the scenes on personal experience like visiting the Villa and going to the Genovese port, I did still have to research the areas and the history to fill in the gaps and round out the historical plot of the story.

Were there any real-life wartime experiments that influenced the teleportation aspect of the story?

Not to my knowledge. I know there were rumors of the Philadelphia Experiment in the 1940’s and the German time machine Bell program but those did not influence the plot.

Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Website | Amazon