Author David Mandy’s Crook’s Paradise
A Story with Roots in Historic Hyde Park
By Tara Kelly
David Mandy grew up in the Hudson Valley, so maybe it’s not surprising that he set his first novel just upriver from FDR’s childhood home in Hyde Park. He’d been reading Before the Trumpet, Geoffrey C. Ward’s biography of the young FDR. When Mandy visited the area, he says, “I was blown away by how these developers had destroyed the town.”
Crook’s Paradise is an environmentalist’s morality tale. The bad guys are the developers turning the lush riverfront into strip malls and parking lots. The good guys are led by a blue blood trying to preserve his family’s estate. Sounds serious, but with a light touch and wry humor, Mandy pulls the reader along.
While Crook’s Paradise is Mandy’s first published book, he says, “I’ve been writing all my life.” It’s a considerable accomplishment for a person with ADHD and dysgraphia. “What characterizes me is that I don’t give up,” he says. “I had to speak it first. The alchemy was getting it on the page.”
“It’s important to never give up on your dream,” he says. Mandy is referring to writing, but he could just as easily be describing his protagonist, Valentine Hitch.
With colorful characters and a worldview that veers toward romance and happy endings, Mandy says, “We live in dark times, so I think we need to have hope for the future.”