December 6, 2022 at 6:11 p.m.
THE CHASE IS ON!
THE CHASE IS ON!
Then author John Gray has the perfect book for you or your favorite bibliophile this Christmas.
“Chasing Rome” is the third and final novel in the Chase Harrington series from Gray, the lead anchor for FOX23/ABC NEWS 10, and was released in October. Like the first two novels, “Manchester Christmas” and “Chasing Manhattan,” the latest installment has Harrington, along with her now-fiancé Gavin, dealing with mystery, loss and love, but this time it is a journey across Italy.
“The only characters that are in every book are Chase and Gavin,” said Gray, a lifelong Catholic and native to the Albany Diocese, when talking about “Chasing Rome” in an interview with The Evangelist. “Gavin was her boyfriend in the first book and in the second book, at the end, they get engaged and they talk about going to Rome for their honeymoon. She doesn’t want to get married here and go to Rome for a week or 10 days. She wants to go and spend a month there and get married there. That’s where the story begins in Rome. Vermont was very quiet, New York City and Westchester County were busier, and I really wanted to make a standalone book and put it in a different place so I put it in Rome.”
While the characters are in Rome, they meet an elderly artist who gives them four riddles that he says will unlock Italy’s most romantic places. This sends the couple on a quest from the Eternal City to Venice to the banks of the Tiber to the island of Elba, meeting people struggling with love and loss.
The rich and vibrant storytelling is all the more impressive considering Gray — who is also known to many area elementary school students for his books “Sweet Polly Petals,” “God Needed a Puppy” and “Keller’s Heart” — has never been to Italy.
“I was going to travel there before I wrote the book but the pandemic happened and I couldn’t,” Gray said. “First thing I did, I watched hours and hours of any videos on Rome; tourism videos, shot-by-local people videos, cool things to do in Rome videos. Literally I was Googling on YouTube ‘10 things I would be surprised of in Italy.’ I watched a lot of that and took notes and from those notes I interviewed three or four people who I thanked in the acknowledgements; some who live there now and some that have always lived there.
“I reached out on Facebook and said I need to talk to people who have a connection to Italy or Rome. People were saying things like, ‘My sister has been living there for 20 years.’ It helped if people were American who were living there a long time because they would have a better understanding of what I would find different. I said, ‘What would surprise you?’ And three different people mentioned cats. I jumped on Google and there are more stray cats in Rome than anywhere on the planet. Anybody who you talk to who has spent time in Rome, on their honeymoon or vacation, will say, ‘Yeah we saw the cats, they are all around the Colosseum.’ ”
While the three books differ on locales, the element of mystery and hidden messages that Chase is receiving and using to help people — from moving images in stained glass (“Manchester Christmas”), to a letter filled with three secrets (“Chasing Manhattan”) and four riddles from an artist (“Chasing Rome”) — are present in all three. One element, however, that is more prominent in “Chasing Rome” is faith.
“I wanted to go more religious in the third book, put more faith in there,” Gray said. “Two of the characters are brothers; one is a Catholic priest in Rome and his brother is a monk living in a monastery in Elba and they factor deeply into the story.”
If you don’t want to start with the third book, make your Christmas shopping easy and buy the trio. They have certainly been well received with glowing reviews on amazon.com.
“My favorite thing to hear is I got to the end and I wished it kept going, I wanted more. That is when I know I might have done an OK job on this thing. It is nice to see the reviews because you never know when you are writing something,” Gray said. “I tell young people when they talk to me about writing, I say, ‘You better be doing it for you.’ I have written three movie scripts in the last couple years during the pandemic, thinking what else could I do? And I put them out there and one of them did OK in a contest and the other two went kaboom right into the ground. I put hours and hours into them and zero has happened with them and now I have to move on. I always tell people to write it for you but you hope that people will read it and like it too.”
To purchase, “Chasing Rome,” (Paraclete Press, $24) or any of Gray’s novels or books, head to your local bookseller or go to amazon.com.
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