Married at nineteen, she was a war widow at twenty. Now 85 years old, Meara Sullivan is determined to reconnect with her husband who died during World War II on D-Day. They knew each other as husband and wife for only five days when Private 1st Class Paul Hughes shipped off for Europe, never to return. CLOSURE, the anchor story of this 7-story anthology, recounts Meara’s unlikely trail of discovery. Told in a series of flashbacks, CLOSURE captures life on the home front for Meara and Paul in 1940s Boston and offers a gripping account of the young soldier’s part in the greatest amphibious invasion in military history. Dan Celeste is both narrator and participant in each of the anthology’s seven tales. His personal story interlaces historical events, intriguing characters, and coming-of-age lessons. CLOSURE and Other Stories spans seven decades, beginning in 1943 and ending in 2011 when Meara completes her quest for renewal.
The Port Jackson Paisans is a story about family, albeit an off-the-wall, dysfunctional, and slightly dangerous one. Narrated in a funeral home by octogenarian Franky DeRossi, it recounts how a bungling band of Italian-Americans stopped the Brooklyn mob from taking over their hometown in 1962. Gritty, poignant and woefully funny, it's the enduring story of family and friendship and the ties that bind. The paisans are well-meaning Goombahs who bet their paychecks on the ponies, concoct doomed stratagems that never make a nickel, run numbers, and live life to the fullest. The Port Jackson Paisans is funny, joyous and irreverent - a window into the lives of a close-knit, small town Italian-American family.
Thou Shalt Not is a story of faith, forgiveness, and spiritual redemption. The prime mover is Father Thomas Delaney, an errant priest, who, in the throes of renouncing his vocation, works a miracle. The story is told against the backdrop of a Roman Catholic Church witnessing a 40 percent falloff in ordinations since 1965, child abuse, evolving sexual orientation among its clergy, and the stifling vows of celibacy and obedience. A 38-year old nonconformist, Father Delaney is torn between the vows he took at his Boston seminary and the debilitating doubts that plague him. Unable to rationalize his commitment to the centuries' old dictates of the Vatican, he lashes out against everything he once held sacred, including his vow of celibacy. Delaney reaches a point where he can no longer define what it is to be a priest. He suspects that his salvation can only come at the hands of divine intervention, in a booming voice, from a billowing cloud, that tells him unequivocally which way to go.
April 14, 1865. Fearing an assassination attempt, and sensitive to his poor health, the president's security officer sends an impersonator to accompany Mary Todd Lincoln to a performance of Our American Cousin playing that evening at Ford's Theatre. It is not the first time an impersonator is used as a stand-in for the failing Abraham Lincoln. At approximately 10:13 p.m., a shot is fired in the presidential box. A man screams, "sic semper tyrannis," and leaps to the floor. Twelve days later, a southern extremist, alleged to be John Wilkes Booth, the president's assassin, is cornered and killed at Garrett's farm in Virginia. Three eyewitnesses claim the body is Booth's. Three others swear it is not. A fourth identifies it as that of James William Boyd who, except for hair color, is the spitting image of the murderer. Both have the initials, JWB. Federal authorities prohibit photographers from taking pictures of the corpse. The body, officially declared to be Booth's, is hastily buried. Four years pass. Booth, under the alias John St. Helen, has artfully avoided discovery and continues the family tradition as an actor on the London stage. Learning that he has assassinated an impostor, and that the president still lives, he immediately sails for America, determined to finish what he started. Near the end of his life, Abraham Lincoln suffered from a disease that has since been identified as Marfan Syndrome. This degenerative tissue and skeletal disease causes disfigurement of the extremities arms, legs and cranium eventually disabling the victim. This, and the constant threat of assassination, required the creative use of impersonators for some of the president's non-speaking public appearances. Such was the case on the night of April 14th, 1865. Dead Wrong chronicles two men's search for the truth about the Lincoln assassination a search separated by 135 years. Dr. Martin Rudd, a forensic scientist at Bethesda Naval Hospital, discovers the first section of his great-great-great grandfather's diary in the basement of their family estate in Saratoga, NY. Malachi Rudd "crazy Malachi" the diary's author, claimed that, while he was a Pinkerton agent in Washington during the late 1860s, he learned the truth about the assassination fraud and the ensuing kidnapping. Malachi also discovers that Booth is alive, has returned to the U.S., and is bent on revenge. He initiates a life-and-death struggle to find the president before Booth does. Is Malachi telling the truth? Secretly, Dr. Rudd performs the DNA testing and confirms his ancestor's preposterous tale. The man assassinated in Ford's Theatre was not Abraham Lincoln. Dr. Rudd becomes obsessed with the unanswered questions. What happened to Lincoln? Did Booth succeed in his second attempt at assassination or did Malachi foil the plot? And finally, what became of Malachi? The answers are in the lost, second part of Malachi's diary. Dr. Rudd must find it and then confront the moral and political dilemma of whether to go public with his discovery. Dead Wrong compels the reader to experience the convulsive forces that produced a great humanitarian like Lincoln and a cold-blooded assassin like Booth. The story unfolds through excerpts from Malachi Rudd's diary and a narrative that relates the concurrent movements of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln, and Lincoln's tormented, guilt-ridden abductors. Dr. Martin Rudd is the vehicle for relating the contemporary part of the novel. From Charleston, SC, through upstate New York and the Sacandaga River Valley, to the Canadian border, the plot propels the reader to a dramatic climax on April 14th, 1870, between Lincoln, Booth and Malachi Rudd in the desolation of the St. Lawrence River Valley.
Married at nineteen, she was a war widow at twenty. Now 85 years old, Meara Sullivan is determined to reconnect with her husband who died during World War II on D-Day. They knew each other as husband and wife for only five days when Private 1st Class Paul Hughes shipped off for Europe, never to return. CLOSURE, the anchor story of this 7-story anthology, recounts Meara’s unlikely trail of discovery. Told in a series of flashbacks, CLOSURE captures life on the home front for Meara and Paul in 1940s Boston and offers a gripping account of the young soldier’s part in the greatest amphibious invasion in military history. Dan Celeste is both narrator and participant in each of the anthology’s seven tales. His personal story interlaces historical events, intriguing characters, and coming-of-age lessons. CLOSURE and Other Stories spans seven decades, beginning in 1943 and ending in 2011 when Meara completes her quest for renewal.
Thou Shalt Not is a story of faith, forgiveness, and spiritual redemption. The prime mover is Father Thomas Delaney, an errant priest, who, in the throes of renouncing his vocation, works a miracle. The story is told against the backdrop of a Roman Catholic Church witnessing a 40 percent falloff in ordinations since 1965, child abuse, evolving sexual orientation among its clergy, and the stifling vows of celibacy and obedience. A 38-year old nonconformist, Father Delaney is torn between the vows he took at his Boston seminary and the debilitating doubts that plague him. Unable to rationalize his commitment to the centuries' old dictates of the Vatican, he lashes out against everything he once held sacred, including his vow of celibacy. Delaney reaches a point where he can no longer define what it is to be a priest. He suspects that his salvation can only come at the hands of divine intervention, in a booming voice, from a billowing cloud, that tells him unequivocally which way to go.
The Port Jackson Paisans is a story about family, albeit an off-the-wall, dysfunctional, and slightly dangerous one. Narrated in a funeral home by octogenarian Franky DeRossi, it recounts how a bungling band of Italian-Americans stopped the Brooklyn mob from taking over their hometown in 1962. Gritty, poignant and woefully funny, it's the enduring story of family and friendship and the ties that bind. The paisans are well-meaning Goombahs who bet their paychecks on the ponies, concoct doomed stratagems that never make a nickel, run numbers, and live life to the fullest. The Port Jackson Paisans is funny, joyous and irreverent - a window into the lives of a close-knit, small town Italian-American family.
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