Book: PRECIOUS FRIENDS: MURDER IN SAG HARBOR
Character: JB Pulaski
We sat down with Joseph Byron Pulaski - JB to the select few he allows close - at his Sag Harbor home, where he received us with the practiced graciousness of a man who has never once been surprised by anything. He was immaculate. The garden behind him looked like a still life. He offered us a martini at ten in the morning, and we said yes.
How would you describe your family or your childhood?
My father was a drunk. My mother was a woman who stayed with a drunk. That covers the essential architecture. I learned early that the safest place in any room was the one closest to the exit, and that the adults most likely to harm you are the ones who insist they love you. I don't say this to invite sympathy - I've never had much patience for people who collect their traumas like souvenir spoons. I simply found it clarifying. You learn, under those conditions, to become very self-sufficient. Very still. Very watchful.
What was your greatest talent?
Observation. I have always been able to read a room - and more importantly, the people in it - with a precision that others find either reassuring or unsettling, depending on what they're hiding. As a professor of sociology, I am paid to notice what others overlook: the subtext beneath the text, the wound beneath the behavior. I've simply never been able to switch it off. My husband finds it exasperating. I find it essential.
Significant other?
My husband, Mike Fogarty. We met on Christmas night, seventeen years ago. I was alone at a bar. He walked in luminous and golden and talked for three hours about his family without pause or pretense, which I found extraordinary - I'd spent a lifetime learning to say as little as possible about mine. We were married. We adopted our son Emilio. We built something I would describe as, at various points, a life. Whether it remains one is a question I find myself revisiting with some frequency.
Biggest challenge in relationships?
I am, by most accounts, a difficult man. I know this. I am exacting, I have high standards, and I have a tendency - which I recognize is a flaw - to believe that if I simply maintain the correct form long enough, the substance will follow. What I have discovered is that not everyone operates this way. Some people, when frightened, do not become more controlled. They become chaotic. They reach for whatever is nearest. Mike and I learned this about each other at great cost.
Where do you live?
Sag Harbor, primarily. The house belonged to my parents - a traditional home with a garden I've made entirely my own, which is perhaps the most honest thing I can tell you about my domestic life. We also keep a loft in Tribeca. Both have their uses. Sag Harbor has a particular quality in summer that I would describe as a collision between the genuinely beautiful and the relentlessly performative. I find that tension useful.
Do you have any enemies?
That is a word people use when they want to feel important. I prefer to think in terms of people who have misunderstood me, and people who have understood me perfectly and found the experience disagreeable. The second group is smaller than you might expect.
How do you feel about the place where you are now? Is there something you are particularly attached to, or particularly repelled by, in this place?
I am deeply attached to my garden. There is something clarifying about growing things - you put in the work, you tend carefully, and the result either flourishes or it doesn't, but the variables are honest. The rest of Sag Harbor in summer can be rather a lot: the money is everywhere and the taste is intermittent, and everyone is performing a version of a life they'd like others to believe they’re living. I find it exhausting and also, I confess, somewhat fascinating. It is a very good place to watch people reveal themselves.
Do you have children, pets, both, or neither?
We have a son, Emilio, whom we adopted, and who is without question the best decision I have ever made. He is perceptive beyond his years - disturbingly so, as it turns out. We also have a dog named Buckley, who asks nothing of me except presence and the occasional walk, and whom I find to be an excellent companion on both counts.
What do you do for a living?
I am a professor of sociology. I have spent my career teaching people to examine the structures beneath social life - the hierarchies, the performances, the unspoken agreements that hold a community together, and the ones that quietly tear it apart. I have always found it instructive that most people live inside these systems without ever once thinking to look at them. Sag Harbor in summer is, in this respect, a remarkably generous field of study.
Greatest disappointment?
I was diagnosed with prostate cancer fourteen months ago. I will not catalogue the indignities of treatment - they are what they are, and self-pity is a luxury I've never been able to afford. What I will say is that I had not anticipated how thoroughly an illness would reveal the true nature of the people around me. Some rose to the occasion. Others, as it turned out, could not bear to remain in the same room with evidence of their own mortality. That was the disappointment. Not the cancer itself, but what it illuminated.
Greatest source of joy?
Emilio. Without reservation. There is a particular quality to loving a child that I did not anticipate - it is entirely unconditional in a way that no other love in my experience has managed to be. He is funny and sharp and occasionally infuriating, and he sees me more clearly than I would prefer. I would do anything for him. I suspect he knows this, which is why he never exploits it.
What do you do to entertain yourself or have fun?
I read. I garden. I practice hot yoga with a discipline that some of my friends find disturbing. I have dinner with Rakesh - he owns the local pharmacy, which means he knows everyone's secrets before I do, and he is not discreet about it, which I find both appalling and enormously useful. I host parties - reluctantly, but effectively. There is also a rather swarthy Italian pianist currently playing at The American Hotel lounge whose presence in our social circle I find - how shall I put this - instructive. And occasionally, when my husband brings home a new stray, I confess to murder. I find it generates a great deal of conversation, and a satisfying amount of fear.
What is your greatest personal failing, in your view?
I believe I am capable of more cruelty than I allow myself to acknowledge. I keep it quite tightly contained - I squash it down, as I once told my doctor - but it is there, and I am not always certain it is entirely without appeal. That is probably the honest answer. A less honest answer would be that I set expectations too high for the people I love. Both are true. The first one concerns me somewhat more.
What keeps you awake at night?
Whether I have been too forthcoming. I made the perhaps ill-advised decision to confess - in passing, at a party - to the murders of two of my husband's previous lovers. I said it to be provocative. I said it because the truth, wielded properly, can be the most effective lie of all. What I did not anticipate is that when a third lover subsequently turns up dead, people begin to take your confessions rather more literally. I find that I am sleeping somewhat less than usual. Though whether that is guilt, or simply the particular alertness of a man who knows he is being watched - I'll leave that for you to decide.
What is the most pressing problem you have at the moment?
A pair of bodies was found in a garage in Sag Harbor last summer. Carbon monoxide. Apparent double suicide. The police have a name. I have my own ideas about how the situation came to pass and what, precisely, everyone involved understood about it. The truth, I've found, is rarely where people think to look for it. It tends to be somewhere quieter. More domestic.
Is there something that you need or want that you don't have? For yourself or for someone important to you?
I want my marriage to be what I believed it was for the first several years of it. I want my body to work the way it did before the cancer and the treatment and the indignities that followed. And I want - this is perhaps the most embarrassing admission I will make - to be seen clearly by the person I chose, and to have him choose me anyway. And for my son to have the father I never had. That is, in the end, what most of us want. We simply dress it up differently.
Why don't you have it? What is in the way?
Fear, mostly. His and, if I'm being scrupulously honest, mine as well. Fear has a way of making people reach for the nearest available distraction rather than turning toward the thing that frightens them. I understand this intellectually. I am working on understanding it in every other way. In the meantime, I tend my garden, I maintain my form, and I watch. I have always been very good at watching. Whether that is a talent or a failing is a question I have not yet fully resolved.
Angelo Perrotta Mysteries #3
Murder in Sag Harbor
The Most Precious Friends Hide the Darkest Secrets
"In the Hamptons, interlopers are as ubiquitous as deer ticks. The only way to remove one is to apply steady, even pressure on the head and pull."
JB Pulaski, a tenured sociology professor, thought surviving cancer was his greatest battle. Now, desperate to save his crumbling marriage, he retreats to his Sag Harbor summer home with his philandering husband Mike and teenage son Emilio.
Instead, he finds humiliation.
When Mike begins a public affair with Italian pianist Gianni Cuomo, JB becomes the summer's most whispered-about scandal—the cuckolded husband everyone pities but no one respects. But when Gianni is found murdered at an exclusive costume party, pity transforms into suspicion, and JB becomes the prime suspect.
Behind the gated driveways and manicured lawns lies a world where appearances are everything and loyalty is currency. As the investigation closes in, JB must confront not only a conspiracy designed to destroy him, but the darkness he's spent a lifetime suppressing. With his son's future hanging in the balance and his own violent impulses emerging, JB discovers that in the Hamptons, the most dangerous predators wear the most beautiful masks.
Thriller Crime | LGBTQ Mystery [ Level Best Books, On Sale: June 2, 2026, e-Book, / ]
Frank Spinelli is a physician from New York.
Writing credits include: The Advocate Guide to Gay Men’s Health and Wellness, Pee-Shy: A Memoir, Perfect Flaw: Angelo Perrotta Mysteries Book 1, No Angels Wept: Angelo Perrotta Mysteries Book 2, contributing author to Our Naked Lives and Understanding the Sexual Betrayal of Boys and Men.
He has made appearances on Sirius Radio and co-hosted Speak Out: Real Talk About AIDS. His documentary credits include 30 Years from Here (Emmy nominated) and Positive Youth. His television credits include ABC News, NBC Nightly News, MTV, and Sesame Street - as well as hosting a season of Dueling Doctors.
He lives in Sag Harbor with his incredibly patient husband and their four-legged adopted son.
Frank Spinelli is an advocate for child sexual abuse survivors and has given frequent interviews about his experience as a victim of child sexual abuse while in the Boy Scouts.
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