Creating Characters #5 - Mark Conti

Sometimes a character just doesn’t want to follow the role I invent for him. Such was the case with Mark Conti. Originally I pictured him as the American Mafia contact for a Camorra family in Naples. But the more I tried, the more Mark Conti resisted. Yes, he came from a Mafia background, but no, he is emphatically not a part of that world now.

Mark Conti

As Marco Conti, Mark  grows up in the streets of Naples, the youngest son of an important Camorra (Mafia) family. The Capo, the head of the family is his much older brother, Don Alfonso. Don Alfonso see little future for Marco in Naples, so allows his brother to go to the United States and gives him  money with which to build his first hotel. From that one start-up business, over the next thirty years Marco Conti builds one of the largest and most important businesses in the country, with no ties to organised crime. 

His businesses have fingers in everything from hotels to banking to mining. Along the way he changes his first name from Marco to the more American, Mark, and marries a very English woman who initially worked for him as his confidential secretary. He adores his wife and spends as much time as he can with her in the Florida mansion on the beach he built for her. To his great sorrow she dies of cancer at forty-seven.

Now at fifty, wealthy beyond measure and a recent widower, he is drawn by old family ties, back into a world of crime, this time on the other side.

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Watch for Blair's newest thriller, Fatal Charm 

Coming in 2017

Blair McDowell's latest tale of Suspense  takes the reader to Italy's  beautiful Amalfi Coast.

"Adamo and Eve are two people who have both been through their own versions of hell. They are both certain that they are not ready to enter into a relationship, but love finds them anyway. Then it takes them on the non-stop thrill ride of their lives."

-   Marlene Harris, readingitall.com

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When Eve Anderson meets Adamo de Leone on a ship bound for Europe, she has no idea of the dark secret that will endanger both their lives. She accompanies him to his home on Italy’s Amalfi Coast to open an inn left to him by his grandfather. But then she learns he spent 5 years in prison for a crime he claims he didn’t commit. Could the man she loves be responsible for embezzling eighty million dollars from the investment firm he once owned?

Adamo wants to hold Eve at arm’s length until he can clear his proud family name. But when there is an attempt on his life and Eve is terrorized by a gun-bearing thug, he realizes how much he wants her, and he must accept whatever help he can get to uncover the well-hidden trail of a six-year-old crime.
 

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