What’s Age Got To Do With It? By Marian Stanley

Indeed.

In my Boston-based thriller, The Immaculate, an elderly nun is murdered. Rosaria O’Reilly, mentored by the nun through a difficult childhood, is drawn into the search for answers to the nun’s murder.

Rosaria’s age is indeterminate, but I had thought of her in her early fifties.

Uh oh.

I was advised to make Rosaria younger.  Twenties or thirties or—on the near side of decrepitude—maybe forty. I stuck with early fifties with this logic.

1. She has more texture after the dings and bangs of life. Her ill-fated first marriage, her close friend Nuncie dying of cancer. Age gives a certain interesting texture.

2. She’s seen enough to get it. In time, one picks up more—the guile on an innocent-looking face or the false cheer of the abused wife.

3. Love is not just for the young. Boston cop Solly Belkin annoys and interests her so much that they may have a future together.

4. She can stand on her own two feet, with or without a relationship. Earn her own living, make her own decisions. Sometimes when things get complicated, Rosaria might wish she had someone to take care of her—but not for long. The price is too high.

5. She has perspective. She knows what’s important—whether it’s the old nun’s last secret mission or Nuncie’s right to die on her own terms.

My plan, as I finish Buried Troubles, the next Rosaria O’Reilly book, is to let her age—as we all do.

Like her protagonist Rosaria O’Reilly in The Immaculate (Barking Rain Press May 2016), Marian McMahon Stanley enjoyed a long international corporate career with a Fortune 500 company and, more recently, a senior position at a large, urban university in Boston. She is the mother of four adult children and a growing number of grandchildren. Marian writes in a small, bookish and historical town outside Boston and in Gloucester, America’s oldest seaport, on Cape Ann. She lives with her husband Bill and — just as in the story — a Westie named Archie.

The Immaculate tells the story of the murder of an elderly, social activist Boston nun in the days prior to the Globe’s Spotlight investigation and at the early stages of the current opioid crisis. Rosaria O’Reilly, one of the nun’s former students, left the neighborhood years ago for a very different life. Now, she and a monkish local detective piece together the motive, method and identity of the murderer through confrontations with a powerful philanthropist, a vicious Boston crime boss and an autocratic monsignor with ambitions for his prestigious Catholic high school.