Wildwood Exit by Joel E. Turner
Author Guest Post + Book & Author Info + A Giveaway!
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Wildwood Exit
A deadly family vendetta at a Jersey Shore restaurant pulls John McGinty (aka Ginty) into a dark world of embezzlement, drug-dealing, a lying wife and a junkie son.
Ginty has just stepped in as the manager of a Wildwood restaurant owned by his friend, Lou Scolletta, after Lou fires the old manager for dipping in the till.
Ginty starts out ordering rolls of salami and bottles of Galliano, but quickly becomes Lou’s consigliere, picking up questionable packages from sketchy associates; tailing Lou’s wife Concetta on her furtive trips to Cape May; scouring the Jersey Shore for Lou’s son, Davy, a junkie on the lam; and wondering why a possibly bent State Trooper keeps showing up everywhere he goes.
Things in Ginty’s world don’t improve when a drug shipment goes wrong, a blackmail note appears…and a body is found floating in Delaware Bay.
Ginty is now the unwilling-yet trusted-confidante of all the Scollettas, and realizes that everyone in this twisted family circle is in danger-including himself.
WILDWOOD EXIT is as sordid as it is comic, and should be on every beach towel from Asbury Park to Cape May.
Genre: Amateur Sleuth, Noir/Hard Boiled, Crime fiction, Noir Fiction, Jersey Shore Noir, Literary Noir
Published by: Level Best Books
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Number of Pages: 329
ISBN: 9781685129729 (ISBN10: 1685129722)
Purchase your copy of Wildwood Exit by clicking any of the following links: Amazon | Kindle | Barnes & Noble | BookShop.org | Goodreads | BookBub | Level Best Books | Main Point Books
Wildwood Exit Research Bureau
By Joel E. Turner
For the sins of setting Wildwood Exit in the 1980s, I was compelled to research a number of topics. Herein are a few.
Drug Prices
Illegal drugs, that is, not amoxicillin, though by the early 1990s, I could have written a treatise on the cost of various antibiotics used to combat the infections of my progeny.
And while it is possible that I might have known something about the price of certain controlled substances due to unsavory friends, I needed to understand the cost of heroin up and down the supply chain. That led me to publications like this one:
Pretty official-looking. Inside, there are tables like this:
More than I needed to know, but that is how research works.
Demographics
I have been to Buena, New Jersey, and know that it has a large Hispanic population today. But in the early 1980s? I began with this document:
Source: New Jersey Data Book(SM) Rutgers Center for Government Services, New Brunswick, NJ
This got me down to Atlantic County. To get to Buena’s detail, I went to the New Jersey Data Book from Rutgers University. Here is a smidgeon of what I pulled:
This was a growing population: by 1990, it was 20% and by 2010, nearly 30%,
Québécois French
Pauline, the protagonist’s love interest, is from a small town in Quebec, and while my high-school-level French (e.g., Où est le chat?) helped me fake some of her native lingo (with the help of my wife’s excellent French education), an appreciation for the peculiarities of the language as spoken in Quebec was aided by articles such as this: The Differences Between French in Quebec and France.
One particularly enchanté slang expression which I did not use is noted therein:
Avoir mal aux cheveux. It roughly translates to “have a hair ache.” It is an expression used to describe an intense headache. One can only assume that it came from the fact that the headache is so severe that it even made the hair feel the pain.
Perhaps I can work that into a future tale.
Character Interviews
This is not truly research, but sometimes I conducted interviews with characters in order to develop their backstory and characterization. Here’s a snippet from one with Concetta, the wife of Ginty’s boss, Lou Scolletta. Their son Davy has a bad addiction problem that has been going on for some time:
Concetta: Yeah. I mean, the whole thing with Davy . . . it had been about a few weeks, he had called me, freaking out, said he was in trouble and needed cash. Course, it wasn’t the first time he asked for money, he was always doing that. Usually it was small amounts, with some cockamamie lie, like I need to get some clothes for a job interview, can you send me $20? Something I could pretend to believe. I mean, he couldn’t call and say, hey, I’m outta drugs, can you front me? But this time, it was different, he said he was in trouble, and the number wasn’t small. It was like a couple hundred and he needed it fast. I actually drove up to the city and met him at like a coffee shop, some disgusting place, I wouldn’t touch anything. He looked horrible, strung out.
I’ll have to tuck away for future use her side comment about not touching anything in the coffee shop.
There’s plenty more rabbit holes that I went down, but I’ll leave you with this excellent picture that helped me get the details of a New Jersey State Police uniform correct.
Wildwood Exit Author Joel E. Turner
Joel E. Turner’s first novel, WILDWOOD EXIT, a noir tale set at the Jersey Shore, was published by Level Best Books in 2025. Amy Rosenberg of the Philadelphia Inquirer called it “a quirky sand-in-your-shoes crime novel with a romantic heart”.
His second novel, BRENDA’S GREEN NOTE, forthcoming from Cynren Press in 2027, is a coming-of-age story about a young woman with synesthesia who harnesses her ability to see sounds as colors to become a key player in the vibrant music scene of the 1960s in Philadelphia.
His fiction has appeared in many US and UK journals. His website joeleturnerauthor.com, has samples/links to his work and posts about books, film and music. Articles he has written about Soul music have been featured on the UK-based Soul Source website, a major platform for news on the Northern Soul scene.
Mr. Turner splits his time between Philadelphia and White Cloud, Michigan.
To learn more about Joel, click any of the following links: JoelETurnerAuthor.com, Amazon Author Profile, Goodreads, Instagram – @bzturner, Threads – @bzturner, BlueSky – @joeleturner.bsky.social & Facebook – @joeleturner2
Elena Hartwell | Elena Taylor
