The Unexpected Salami A Novel

It's your basic video shoot. The lead singer of the Tall Poppies, lime green makeup in place, wails into the camera, "I'm bent and distorted, like a gnome I'm contorted." The Tall Poppies are still looking for their big break in the crapshoot known as the music business. So when their drummer is gunned down right in the middle of the video - and the murder is caught on camera - they finally make it onto TV screens around the world. Their biggest fan, Rachel Ganelli, had escaped to Australia as a way out of a pending marriage and a mundane job, and away from her endlessly meddling parents. But when she finds herself witness to the murder, she hastens back to New York, where life is more predictable. Or so she thinks. Before she's had a chance to take a deep breath of city air, Rachel's sense of what happened back in Australia is turned on its head. Part black comedy, part love story, The Unexpected Salami introduces Lauri Gwen Shapiro as a fresh, new master of what The New York Times called "screwball comedy."

Laurie Gwen Shapiro is a native Manhattanite. Her resume includes time as a sex call screener for Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and as Peter Jennings's assistant at a publishing company. She now works full-time writing fiction and screenplays and coproducing independent films, including The McCourts of Limerick and Once When I Was a Cannibal. She's currently writing the screenplay for The Unexpected Salami which has been optioned for a film by Radical Media.