Icarus Flies Home follows a Jazz bassist as he tries to publish his great-great uncle’s lost music, only to discover someone else has claimed the rights to it. What was the inspiration for the setup to your story?

We took a tour of one of the biggest former plantations in the South. As we toured the home and went into the parlor, the guide told talked about the famous people who had likely spent time there, including literary and film stars, people like George and Ira Gershwin. Maybe they had even passed through at some point. As a musician, I wondered what could have inspired them and what if, I wondered, they had heard something that influenced their own musical compositions?

Beauregard (“Bo”) Sonski-Abbott wants to honor a lost relative but has to overcome unbelievable odds to do so. What were some driving ideals behind your character’s development?

He’s torn because he wants to think the best of people. He also doesn’t know how to wrap his mind around something so profound, that his relative lived his life enslaved and all he must have endured. He was a musician and Bo was trying to understand how one could still find joy amid the horrors and tragedy in a life like that.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

Legacy, family relationships, love, marriage, and who really owns a song; the idea of intellectual property when a person had been stripped of all rights.

What is the next book that you are working on and when will it be available?

By this fall/2022! A murder mystery about a sax player. There’s a pretty obscure event in jazz history that this book explores. It takes place in Brooklyn, NY and St. Petersburg (Russia).

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Original source: https://literarytitan.com/2022/08/21/find-joy-amid-the-horrors/