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Mark Carlos McGinty is a descendant of Cuban cigar makers.He grew up on ropa vieja, Cubansandwiches, café con leche, andfresh-squeezed OJ from his grandfather’s tree in West Tampa. His favorite cigaris the Arturo Fuente Flor Fina 8-5-8. Mark’s first novel Elvis and theBlue Moon Conspiracy (Beaver’s Pond Press, 2003) won an Eric Hoffer BookAward Honorable Mention for General Fiction. He lives in Minneapolis with hiswife and daughter.

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HIDDEN DOORS, SECRET ROOMS - a paranormal suspense: "Superbly crafted and flawlessly executed, Eubanks doles out both plot and back-story in small doses, expertly keeping readers turning page after page...This is a phenomenal first novel; an excellent read for anyone who loves mystery, and would-be writers who want to learn exactly how it’s done." - KIRKUS REVIEWS Jillian Braedon possesses a secret so explosive that she must be silenced. On the run with her five-year-old daughter, stranded in the middle of a blizzard and critically injured, Jill sends little Valerie off into the raging storm alone. The child stumbles onto the property of retired musician-turned-recluse, John Mills, begging for help. John soon finds himself caught up in their torment, and face-to-face with the pursuing covert agents, who will do anything to destroy the secret, and silence everyone involved.

Story Behind The Book

The following is a work of fiction and is loosely based on real events. In some places, the actual history may have been altered to suit the story. An additional author’s note at the end of the book will explain these historical discrepancies in further detail and also provide additional sources for reading about Ybor City’s fascinating history.

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As author <a href="http://thecigarmaker.net/markmcginty.php">Mark McGinty</a> notes in the acknowledgments of his second novel, <a href="http://thecigarmaker.net/about.php">The Cigar Maker </a>owes a stylistic debt to influences ranging from such literary luminaries as James Ellroy, Mario Puzo, and William Shakespeare to such epic film trilogies as Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Lord of the Rings. Indeed, “epic” is perhaps the best word to describe this dense and moving novel, for it has both the multigenerational sweep of works like John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and the social awareness of John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy. All of this is to say that for his sophomore literary outing, McGinty has done nothing short of producing the great American novel. Part of what makes The Cigar Maker both “great” and “American” is that the novel is steeped in the immigrant experience. Shortly after the sinking of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_%28ACR-1%29">USS Maine</a>, a young father named Salvador Ortiz moves his family from Cuba to the United States and goes to work making a living for himself as a cigar maker. The Florida city in which he finds himself, moreover, is a hotbed of political and criminal industry, and it isn’t long before Ortiz — who wants nothing more than to provide for his wife and children — becomes embroiled in the the town’s machinations. In this regard, The Cigar Maker also reads like a literary version of Martin Scorcese’s Gangs of New York with a Cuban flare. That is, it’s a historical tale of class struggle with a distinctly humane focus in that the story of the Ortiz family mirrors not only the story of American workers but the story of America itself. None of this, of course, is to say that The Cigar Maker presents an overly rosy picture of the American dream. Ortiz struggles daily just to get by, and he endures more setbacks than triumphs throughout the novel. Yet he never gives up, and keeps fighting for the greater good because, more than anything, he is a man of great conscience — a rarity, perhaps, in the current postmodern literary landscape, but a breath of fresh air as well. Though The Cigar Maker is largely a historical novel, the issues it touches upon are as relevant today as they were a century ago: labor relations, immigration, and the nation’s involvement in foreign wars chief among them. What’s especially striking about The Cigar Maker, however, is that it doesn’t treat these issues as discrete phenomena; rather, it explores the interconnectedness of all three. In so doing, the novel reminds us that although we are all in many ways beholden to the vast machinery of forces beyond our control, we are all, nonetheless, creatures of conscience and are all, thus, responsible for doing what we can to shape the world into the place we want it to be. Painstakingly researched and lovingly crafted, The Cigar Maker is a serious and significant novel about the American experience. The writing is beautiful, the characters lively, and the settings awash with visceral historical detail. An excellent book on all counts.-Small Press Reviews From the mountains of 19th century Cuba, where bandits and revolutionaries fought to overthrow Spanish dominance, to the floor of the cigar factories in Ybor City, Florida, where labor leaders sought to defend Cuban workers from exploitation by Spanish business owners, The Cigar Maker delivers a riveting, little-known chapter in the history of Latino-Americans in the US southeast. Salvador Ortiz, a young man orphaned by violence in his homeland of Cuba, joins a group of bandits as a “torch and machete” man, terrorizing a Spanish plantation owner by kidnapping his daughter, but grows into a husband, a father, a community leader, and a man of honor and dignity in this novel of labor movements and corruption in turn-of-the-century Florida. Dianne K. Salerni Author of We Hear the Dead, Sourcebooks, April 2010

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HIDDEN DOORS, SECRET ROOMS

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