A.E.S. O’Neill grew up going to private school paid for by a mobster father, rocks out to the Grateful Dead and Beethoven for inspiration, reads comics to never lose his inner-child, and disregards most of society’s rules—except for the importance of decency, empathy and humanity. Roll it all up? He gathers and tells stories.

After several decades of film school, professional writing, public speaking, and travel blogging (www.outspokentraveler.com) experience, his debut novel, Even a Pandemic Can’t Stop Love and Murder, a three-volume, romance/thriller that takes place in the mid-2020s, is based on a true story. Told to him by his father years ago, the plot centers on a robbery at mob-owned bank and the violent consequences that followed.

From a childhood marked by wiretaps, mob dinners, and FBI agents following his father, O’Neill learned to understand the complexities of love, crime, and human behavior that drives right and wrong. Inspired by the snappy patter of 1930s talkies, and the mundane, ever present danger of the Pandemic Era, he used this story to show what he believes are the major themes in human behavior: the interplay of light and dark, of love and death, of choices made and lived with. Despite all of his own life’s more challenging lessons, O’Neill knows that love will always win.

Two subsequent volumes in the Even a Pandemic series—Paying the Price (cover below) and Checking Out—are soon to come.