As America sat immobilized while planes hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, my own September 11th, twenty-five years earlier, came flooding back. Watching the towers crumble brought me back to September 11, 1976, when my husband Brian Murray, a member of the New York City Police Department Bomb Squad, was killed by a bomb Croatian freedom-fighters placed in a Grand Central Station locker before hijacking TWA Flight 355 from LaGuardia airport. 

As I waited for my husband to return home that evening, the hijacked flight landed in Paris. As I kissed my little boys good night, Brian moved the device from Grand Central Station to a disposal site. As I slept, the bomb exploded. 

This is the story of seduction by one of the hijackers, whose persuasive letters offered a link back to my husband. Our correspondence unraveled the complexities of our lives and allowed me to grow from a child expected to quit school at sixteen, to a woman who took on the NYPD and the City of New York, graduated magna cum laude to become a professor of English, and finally, to stand up to the woman responsible for my husband’s death.

Ultimately, this is a survivor’s story, as I moved from being the unintended target of a political battle waged by people from a war-torn country, to become co-founder of Survivors of the Shield, a group that advocates for and provides support and assistance to the spouses and children of New York City police officers killed in the line of duty.

It is the story of resilience in the face of senseless tragedy and of evil villains and surprising superheroes. The subplots include my second husband who coaxed me back to love, Gracie, my heroin-addicted sister who gave me hope, and the ways in which the death of my husband brought back an estranged mother, as beguiling in her complexity as one of the hijackers who befriended me.