Howard Engel – författare

One morning, prolific and bestselling crime novelist Howard Engel awoke to discover he had lost the ability to read. He had experienced a stroke that left him with the rare condition known as alexia sine agraphia—he could write, but as soon as he committed his thoughts to the page, he no longer knew what they were. Other effects of the stroke emerged over time, but none were as dramatic and devastating as this one for a man who made his living working with words.

The Man Who Forgot How to Read is the warm, insightful and fascinating story of Engel’s fight to overcome a condition that threatened to end his career. Engel’s remarkable triumph over his affliction—he was finally able to write again and produced another bestselling Benny Cooperman detective novel, Memory Book—will inspire his fans and fascinate anyone interested in the mysteries of the human brain.

It’s autumn 1925, and a killer uncannily like England’s Jack the Ripper is stalking the streets of Paris and preying on young women. Michael Ward is a journalist newly arrived to the Left Bank. When he falls in with Jason Waddington, an expatriate American writer who introduces him to the cafe scene and his crowd of writers and artists, Ward soon discovers that Jack de Paris is not the only trouble afoot in the City of Light. Rumor has it that Waddington has written a damaging roman à clef about his friends, and tempers are rising as fear of the killer grips the city. When the body of Laure Duclos is found, it seems their circle has finally been touched by Jack. But Ward has his doubts, and begins to wonder whether Laure was truly Jack de Paris’s latest victim, or if someone else with a grudge against a former lover was using the serial killer as a convenient cover for murder.