Title: In Our Secret Life: A Novel
Author: A. Tony Mendoza
Publisher: Sly Dog Press, El Paso, Texas
On sale: October 27, 2026 (hardcover and ebook)
Hardcover
ISBN 979-8-9969706-1-2
$34.99 · 390 pages · 6 × 9 in, jacketed
Ebook
ISBN 979-8-9969706-3-6
$9.99
Trade paperback
ISBN 979-8-9969706-0-5
$18.99 · On sale June 1, 2027
Genre: Historical fiction / Crime fiction
Audience: Adult; book clubs
Includes: Reading group guide
Library of Congress Control Number: 2026925627
Distribution: Ingram. Available to bookstores and libraries at standard trade terms.
Available from: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org and independent bookstores
Nobody suspects the schoolteachers. You wouldn’t have either.
Jerry and Rita Adler meet in 1955 in the Catskills, two pickpockets who know their own kind on sight. Recognition becomes a pact, and the pact becomes a marriage: fifty-seven years, two children, a hundred countries, and a life no teacher’s salary could ever explain. For fifty years, nothing they steal is ever reported missing. Everything they take, they sell. All but one.
Rita tells the story herself, moving backward from her final days, as the illness taking her memory threatens the secret she guarded her whole life. The mind that hid everything is now trying to give it away.
In Our Secret Life is a love story with an art theft in it, for readers of historical and book-club fiction drawn to long marriages, late-life reckonings and true-crime-inspired storytelling. It does not solve the real case. It imagines a marriage.
The True Story Behind the Novel
On November 29, 1985, the day after Thanksgiving, a man and a woman walked into the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson. While the woman distracted a guard, the man cut Willem de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre from its frame. They were gone in under fifteen minutes. The painting vanished for thirty-two years.
In August 2017, antique dealers in Silver City, New Mexico, bought the contents of a retired couple’s estate. Behind a bedroom door hung the missing de Kooning, valued by then at as much as $160 million. The dealers returned it to the university. After conservation at the Getty, it went on view in Los Angeles in the summer of 2022 and came home to Tucson that fall.
No one was ever charged. The theft remains officially unsolved.
Fact and fiction. In Our Secret Life is a novel. Jerry and Rita Adler are invented characters, not portraits of real people. The author’s note in the book sets out where the documented record ends and the imagined story begins.
Short bio
A. Tony Mendoza is an El Paso entrepreneur, publisher and editor who started his first business at nineteen. He published an El Paso business newspaper and was named the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year. In Our Secret Life is his first novel.
Long bio
A. Tony Mendoza started his first business at nineteen and has spent his career as an entrepreneur, publisher and editor in El Paso, Texas. He was publisher and editor of an El Paso business newspaper and spent fifteen years building and publishing specialty directories. The U.S. Small Business Administration named him its Young Entrepreneur of the Year, and the following year its Small Business Media Advocate of the Year.
For the past six years he has been the primary caregiver for his father, Anastacio “Tacho” Mendoza Sr., the 1955 Texas State Golden Gloves champion, who lives with Alzheimer’s disease. That experience shaped Rita, the narrator of In Our Secret Life, whose memory is slipping away even as she fights to hold on to the story of her marriage. The novel is dedicated to his father.
Mendoza designed the book’s cover himself and wrote “In Our Secret Life,” an original song created for the novel, with a music video. He lives in El Paso.
The heist nobody could explain. A $160 million painting hung in a quiet couple’s bedroom for three decades. A novelist asks the question every reporter asked in 2017: how does an ordinary life hide something that big?
A caregiver’s novel about memory. An El Paso son caring for his father with Alzheimer’s wrote a love story narrated by a woman losing her memory. For health, aging and caregiver coverage, and Alzheimer’s awareness programming.
A Southwest mystery, retold. The theft happened in Tucson. The painting surfaced in Silver City, New Mexico. For Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas outlets, a regional story with a new chapter.
El Paso entrepreneur turns novelist. A longtime El Paso publisher and SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year publishes his first novel through his own press.
A father, a Golden Gloves title and a dedication. The novel is dedicated to Anastacio “Tacho” Mendoza Sr., the 1955 Texas State Golden Gloves champion. For sports-history and community features.
A love story for readers over 50. Fifty-seven years of marriage, told by the woman who lived it. For book-club, lifestyle and senior-living outlets.
Interviews
A. Tony Mendoza is available for print, radio, television and podcast interviews: in person in El Paso and the Southwest, and by phone or video nationwide. He also speaks to book clubs, libraries, museums and caregiver groups.
Review copies
Print and digital review copies are available to journalists, reviewers, podcasters and booksellers. Email your name, outlet and preferred format (print or digital).
Media contact
A. Tony Mendoza
Email: press@inoursecretlife.com
Phone: email for phone number
Media inquiries answered within 24 hours.
Last updated October 2026
