A dead body; a mysterious North Korean woman; a ghost city in the interior of China known informally as the Maze; international intrigue and unexpected romance as detective Chien Marc tries to unravel the mystery without getting caught in the web of treachery. It’s all there in Gerry Garibaldi’s new thriller, The Sixth Door of Happiness.

Goodreads, a reviewing site, calls Gerry’s book “a gritty police thriller,” and compares it to two espionage classics, describing The Sixth Door of Happiness as “The Thirty Nine Steps meets The Spy who came in from the Cold.”

Gerry, who lives in Essex, says it was China’s ghost cities that first set him thinking about writing a mystery novel.

“One day reading an article about ghost cities it struck my imagination; a setting for a wonderful thriller,” Gerry says.

Regarding ghost cities, the Chinese government built the cities in interior regions of the country, planning to populate them with transplanted Chinese citizens who would work in industries that would also be constructed as part of the plan.

Some of the cities, modeled after European capitals down to the smallest details, are as yet underpopulated, thus the name “ghost cities.” The eerie urban landscape in which The Sixth Door of Happiness takes place, informally known as the Maze, was constructed as an imitation of Paris.

Gerry says he has always been fascinated by China. As far back as his college years, Li Po, an eighth-century Chinese author recognized in his own time and today as a master of verse, was Gerry’s favorite poet. That was a time when Gerry himself was contemplating being a poet.

Since then, he has been many different things, teacher, a screen writer, a development executive for a movie production company, a freelance journalist, and now novelist. But never a poet.

The ability to self-publish was what convinced Gerry to write.

“When I heard about self-publishing, I leapt at it,” he says. “You skip all the steps like endless editing.”

Not that Gerry lacked for an editor. His wife, Jenny Tripp, herself a writer and editor, did that job for him. The Sixth Door of Happiness is the fourth novel Gerry has written. Two of his earlier novels, Mean Sun and The River of Sin, had a maritime theme, inspired by his own fondness for C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels.

Gerry did computer research for a year and a half before starting the actual writing of his new book. He wanted the details about how a criminal investigation would proceed in China.

“What was the procedure, what did the gun look like, the holster, what hours did the detective work, who was in charge of the investigation?” he explains. “I thought you needed that for the readers to understand. The research was exhaustive, as accurate as I could make it.”

He found a site called Bitter Winter that regularly exposed corruptions and malfeasance in the Chinese system that he says was very helpful as he detailed the corruption that surrounded the investigation in the book.

“The Chinese government hates the site,” he explains.

Most of Gerry’s research was done sitting at an easy chair in his living room. He has not traveled to China. He does not see that as a disqualifying factor.

“You see only tourist things when you go,” he says, pointing out that Shakespeare, many of whose plays were set in Italy, had never traveled to that country.

Gerry wrote during the week. The doll house sitting in the corner of the living room explains what he did on weekends: play with his granddaughters, one eight years old and the other three months.

“Learning about diapers again,” he says.

Gerry and Jenny have a grown daughter and son.

Gerry bears a famous last name: Garibaldi. Giuseppe Garibaldi, a l9th-century Italian patriot and general, was a key figure in the formation of the unified Italian state.

“Fifth generation removed, through my grandmother,” Gerry says.

Gerry himself grew up in a tight-knit Italian community in Daly City, right outside of San Francisco.

“Growing up I thought everyone was Italian,” he says.

He and Jenny met at Skyline Junior College in Daly City. Jenny went on to the University of California at Berkley and Jerry finished at San Francisco State.

Gerry’s father was not impressed by his college interests and his love of poetry. Instead, he told Gerry to go pick spinach. Jerry chose grapes instead.

It was a grueling experience. Even in the heat, Gerry wore a heavy sweat shirt to protect him from the DDT sprayed on the grapes.

“Made me think about a life of crime,” he says.

Grapes gave way to adventure. Gerry and Jenny went to New York.

“It was in the Carter years, raging inflation, but we went,” he says.

Gerry worked at a movie production company until it produced three flops in a row and went out of business. With no job and no prospects, Gerry had a suggestion: “I said to Jenny, ‘Let’s go to Hollywood,’” he recalls.

Back in California, he got jobs doing rewrites and perfected what he calls his husband skills. Jenny became one of the chief writers on Disney’s The Lion King.

In the end, they decided to come back to the East Coast, to Connecticut.

“It was Jenny’s favorite state,” Gerry says

Before he retired, Gerry, now 70, taught English and journalism and New Britain Technical High School and wrote freelance magazine articles.

Finishing The Sixth Door of Happiness was both a relief and a worry.

“I worried if I had done a good enough job; in the end I had to let it go,” he says.

But he’s not letting it go far. Gerry now plans to start research on his second novel featuring detective Chien Marc.