



Mary Alice Gorman was my best friend, my lover, my companion and my wife for 47 years from 1971 until her death in 2018. She was an amazing person in so many ways, influenced so many people, was big-hearted, passionate, smart and loving. She was an amazing mother not only to her biological daughter Alison but to a host of other "children" that she captured in her orbit, protected, nurtured and guided. With the founding of Mystery Lovers Bookshop in 1990 she came into her own and was able to pour all of her passion and smarts into creating a bookstore that was nationally recognized, beloved by both readers and authors, and which has survived to reach its 26th year of operation.

My family is quite small, as opposed to Mary Alice's. Both my maternal grandmother had only a brother and a sister and my paternal grandmother had only a sister. That sister, Rose, had two daughters: Janice and Barbara. Although she was my father's aunt she was so much younger than Lena that I thought of her as my aunt and her daughters, who were about my sister's age, as my cousins. They both live in Boca Raton and Alison and I visit them whenever we get down to Miami.


