award-winning author Lou Berney’s NOVEMBER ROAD (on sale 10/9). This remarkable novel defies categorization – it’s a thriller, it’s historical fiction, it’s a love story—above all it’s an amazing piece of storytelling. I wanted to highlight some topics that I thought would be great for an interview with Lou Berney’s NOVEMBER ROAD (on sale 10/9): • JFK’s Brain is Missing: While a lot of the conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination are pretty wild, the facts are just as incredible. For example, JFK’s brain, which might have answered once and for all from which direction the fatal shot was fired, vanished from the National Archives in 1966. It has never been found. • In NOVEMBER ROAD, New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello orchestrates the Kennedy assassination. Several different conspiracy theories are intriguing, but Berney thinks the Marcello theory is the most plausible. Marcello, the most powerful and dangerous mob boss in America at the time, stayed out of the headlines, kept a low profile, and – unlike contemporaries such as Sam Giancana – lived to a ripe old age before he died of natural causes. A sign in his office said: Three can keep a secret if two are dead. A time of turmoil and uncertainty: 2018 or 1963? • In 1963 profound change was beginning to ripple across the country: Civil Rights, women’s rights, international relations and the threat of nuclear war. The Kennedy assassination crystallized for Americans the sense that they faced the unnerving prospect of an unknowable future. • The assassination of the President, and her own reaction to it, motivates Charlotte to leave her husband and head to California. As a woman in 1963, she faced obstacles that women had traditionally faced, but also recognized an opportunity to change her life. Author Lou Berney’s mother found herself in a similar situation at the time, before he was born. He always wondered “what if” she had chosen a different path. • America in post-war ‘50s and early ‘60s has often been depicted as idyllic, peaceful, and prosperous. This was not necessarily the case for significant segments of the population. Theodore, the young African-American man hired by the hitman to drive him, represents how pervasive racial inequality was at the time, and how members of marginalized communities lived under very difficult rules, with very different prospects. • Frank Guidry grows up very poor in rural Louisiana, and like Theodore he’s swept up into a life of crime be