By: Alexander Sebastian
Most second careers begin quietly, a hobby, a passion project, a long-shelved dream finally taken off the shelf. Few begin with murder.
But Mickey Zinczenko did not return to writing to be gentle. After thirty years as a department manager at JCPenney, a part-time stint as a receptionist in retirement, and a children’s book during the pandemic, she sat down to write the kind of novel she had always wanted to read. The result was My Dear Sweet Lily, a dark, fast-moving psychological thriller about a family destroyed by a femme fatale who hides a monstrous secret behind a glittering modeling empire.
It would not be her last.
A Trilogy Taking Shape
Zinczenko’s work is built around a single, unsettling premise: that corruption is inherited like a name. My Dear Sweet Lily introduces the Corona family, Jack, the salesman who falls for the wrong woman; Mary, the wife slowly drowning; and their two children, Jonathan and Sophia, who absorb the wreckage of their parents’ choices and carry it into their own.
The sequel, My Darling Sophia, asks what happens to a survivor who has spent her childhood watching predators. The answer is not redemption. It is a transformation. Sophia leaves the wreckage of her family behind, takes a new face, a new name, and a new continent, only to discover that the woman who corrupted her did not have to teach her very much. Most of it, it turns out, was already there.
A third book, My Precious Jonathan, is in the works.
A Protagonist Who Refuses to Be One Thing
What sets the series apart is Zinczenko’s willingness to let her characters be both victim and perpetrator at once. Sophia is not redeemed by her suffering, nor condemned by her cruelty. She is simply, recognizably, both, a young woman who learned the wrong lessons from the wrong teacher and chose to apply them.
For readers of dark psychological suspense, this is familiar ground. But Zinczenko writes it with an older, plainer voice. There is no irony in her violence and no glamour in her glamour. The modeling agencies are corrupt. The doctors are crooked. The mansions are pretty until the bodies pile up.
It is fiction that knows what it is doing.
The Recurring Cross
A throughline of the first book is a small device that returns across each character’s introduction, a short, dark verse, written like a nursery rhyme, ending with the phrase “this is my cross to bear.” Each member of the Corona family receives one. Each verse condenses a lifetime of choices into eight or ten lines.
It is one of the more arresting structural choices in recent suspense fiction. The verses act as warnings, confessions, and small dark prayers. They give the novel a folk-tale quality that sits uneasily against its modern settings, and they suggest a writer thinking carefully about how moral weight gets transmitted from one generation to the next.
In a genre that often treats violence as spectacle, Zinczenko treats it as inheritance.
Writing Through Illness
Zinczenko’s path to publication was not a straight one. She first tried to write twenty-five years ago and set the manuscript aside. She returned to the page during the pandemic, finished both a children’s book and her first adult novel, and has been writing steadily ever since.
Along the way, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She chose not to slow down.
“Life is short,” she has said, “so do what makes you happy.”
The phrase reads differently after you have read her books. What makes Mickey Zinczenko happy is not light reading. It is the slow, careful construction of characters most authors would not have the patience or the nerve to follow into the dark.
About the Author
Mickey Zinczenko spent thirty years as a department manager at JCPenney before retiring to write full-time. She is the author of a children’s book and two adult psychological thrillers, My Dear Sweet Lily and My Darling Sophia, with a third book in the series, My Precious Jonathan, on the way. She lives in Oxford, Pennsylvania, and proudly shares the title of “author” with one of her two stepsons. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she continues to write daily.
Get Copies of Mickey Zinczenko’s Books
There is a certain kind of reader who finishes a thriller and wants the next one immediately, and a different kind who finishes one and wants to sit with it for a while. Zinczenko writes for both. Her novels are fast, propulsive, even, but the questions they leave behind are slow.
How much of who we become is taught to us?
How much do we choose?
And when the people who shaped us turn out to be monsters, what do we owe the child we used to be?
Find My Dear Sweet Lily and My Darling Sophia by Mickey Zinczenko on Amazon.
