March/April 2005

Colonial Times Magazine

Hot off the Presses

Attorney/author Andrew McAleer has a new mystery coming out any day now too. Bait and Switch, which wheels and deals through the stolen car racket, is the Lexington author's sequel to his first detective novel, Double Endorsement. Lead characters James Hillton and Sophia Blossom continue their wisecracking adventures and take a roller-coaster ride through the underworld of crime.

In the story and in reality, Boston had been labeled "The Stolen Car Capital of the United States." McAleer says that as incredible as it may seem, "the flim flam around which Bait and Switch is structured is based on an actual criminal case prosecuted in Boston some years ago. The matter was referred to the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office by the then newly-founded Governor's Auto Theft Strike Force."

Leonard J. Henson, the Chief of the Organized Crime Division in Suffolk County and a colleague of McAleer, prosecuted the case to a successful conclusion. Just as in Double Endorsement, McAleer took this real-life crime situation and adapted it to his purposes. In Bait and Switch he moved the case "forward a few years." He joked that he didn't want to reveal "my capacious knowledge of the late '70s and early '80s and, therefore, what an old ninny I really am."