TUXEDO PARK – New York City attorney Thomas Kenniff represented John Reilly during the high-profile DoorDash shooting trial earlier this year in one of Orange County’s most closely watched criminal cases.
However, the County courthouse in Goshen wasn’t viewed by Kenniff as an upstate outpost. His connection to Orange County ran much deeper. Long before he argued before an Orange County jury, Kenniff spent much of his youth in Tuxedo Park in the early 1980s.
Summers and weekends in the historic gated village left a lasting impression on Kenniff, inspiring his debut novel, a thriller called Tuxedo Park.
“I remember being schlepped up to Tuxedo Park from Long Island with my parents when I was six or seven years old to see family,” Kenniff said. “It was a unique place, and a big part of my childhood. Even as a kid from Long Island, I knew Tuxedo Park was special. It will always be an important part of my memories as a kid.”
Kenniff’s uncle, Robert Gehrig, and grandmother, Vera Gehrig, both lived in Tuxedo Park for most of the 1980s. Ms. Gehrig died unexpectedly in 1989, and Robert Gehrig later moved to Florida. When Kenniff, 51, hatched the idea for the book, he chose Tuxedo Park.
In the fictional book, attorney John Palmer is awoken by an early morning phone call summoning him to a crime scene in Tuxedo Park involving his old summer flame, Susan Sterling. Palmer is asked to moonlight on the case with an old mentor. As the trail of evidence eventually leads to president-elect Kent Dawson, Palmer is in a race against time, trying to stop a cold- blooded sociopath before he takes the nation’s highest office.
To succeed, he must overcome bureaucratic obstruction, political henchmen, and his own guilt over his and Susan’s buried romantic past.
“I have a fairly active imagination, and my inspiration was 25 years in the criminal justice system,” said Kenniff, a retired major in the Army National Guard Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps and a veteran of the Iraq War. “As an attorney, you write a lot of legal stuff, which must have references and citations. When you write fiction, you can have more creativity. You can say what you want, which was liberating.”
Tuxedo Park will be released by Post Hill Press on August 18. To reserve a copy, go to
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