John Roumas has been a Queens resident since 1968. A graduate of Brooklyn Tech, Parsons School of Design, and New York University, he continually received inspiration and encouragement about his writing from his teachers and professors. Writing short stories since he was a young boy, he continued with these efforts while working for 42 years as a designer and planner of corporate office environments.
Retiring in 2002, John began writing full time. To date, he has completed twenty-one books, but it was not until the summer of 2017 that he began to self-publish any of them.
“It is a phenomenal moment seeing your book in print for the first time,” he says. “And the icing on the cake was that my oldest son, Jason, who is a graphic designer, designed the cover for me – as he has with all my books since.” (John will offer to share the details and requirements of the process and his experiences with anyone who may be considering publishing something they have written.)
The first book he chose to print was a novel about New York City uniformed police officers in the fictional 116th Precinct hunting a serial killer, called The Slaughter Response. This thriller was the third in an “NYPD Trilogy,” with settings in actual locations throughout Queens neighborhoods, including Rockaway Beach, Broad Channel, Howard Beach, Hamilton Beach, Ozone Park, Glendale, Forest Hills, Rego Park, and Middle Village, among others, and portrays many characters, a complex plot, and a twist or two you won’t see coming.
These three police novels required extensive research, and John is grateful for the cooperation of over a dozen officers of the NYPD, who he worked with for months, and who were of indescribable help in keeping the details in these books as authentic as possible.
The Slaughter Response is available on Amazon.com, along with the six other novels and six novellas John has published through Kindle Direct. Beside the three police novels, there are four action-adventures, three crime novellas, and three mysteries.
“I enjoy reading books that are entertaining, have interesting characters, are fast-moving, and contain surprises as well as plausible endings,” John says. “So I try to make every book I write offer these things to my readers. At a book-signing, I was asked where I get my ideas from, but truly didn’t know how to respond; imagination is difficult to define. But at a book club meeting earlier this year, where I was honored when they selected one of my novels that month, I was asked why I write. That was an easier question to answer. I just replied, ‘I’m a storyteller. I have to.’”
John resides in Rego Park, with his wife, Hope.
