A Legal Thriller that will transport you through the mysteries of the Everglades, Seminole Culture and Astrophysics.
Estella Verus – part Seminole, part black, part white – a federal prosecutor in South Florida, is the victim of a home invasion during which she is beaten and raped. The rapist leaves a note saying that Estella’s son, Andrew, sent him to do it. When Andrew is charged with complicity in the crime, Estella is desperate to talk to him in her efforts to discover the truth, but while she’s still in the hospital recovering from her injuries, Andrew’s lawyer has her served with a restraining order, preventing her from talking to him to protect his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. (Read excepts from the book below)
Excerpts from the Speed of Life, An Illustrated Novel
Providence’s mate undulates into the room. He rises like a cobra poised to strike, then in a display of eukaryotic fission, he evolves into two snakes that coil in a double volute around a beam of brilliant transparent purple neon light. Andrew emerges from one of the snakes shedding his skin. He is naked, his own reddish-brown skin appears to be soft, flawless, shimmering as if reflecting the ethereal purple light. His face a portrait of the anguish of birth.
Betty Mae, reaching for her daughter’s hand, felt amniotic fluid soaking the car seat. Then, suddenly, the veil lifted, and the headlights illuminated— what? Dante’s Leopard of Malice? his Lion of Violence? the She-Wolf of Incontinence? No. It was merely an alligator lumbering across the road – ten feet long, five hundred pounds – the car hurtling toward it at ninety feet per second.
She jerked the steering wheel. The brakes screeched. The reptile, swiveled on its hind legs, skirling as the car slammed into it, a flash of its scaly-olive hide, the carcass tumbling head over tail onto the hood, cracking the windshield with an earsplitting bam.
A neutron star, making five hundred revolutions per second, pulsing beams of radio waves from its poles, spun and turned in an orbit around a cooling supergiant red star in the throes of its own imminent solar mortality as it exhausted the elements that fueled the nuclear fusion necessary to create the outward thermal pressure that counteracted the crushing forces of gravity.
Suddenly, the core and superheated outer layers of plasma and gasses of the giant star, more than ten times the size and mass of the sun, collapsed. This violent implosion was abruptly halted by the near-unstoppable nuclear force, pressure exerted by neutrons squeezed so closely together that they counteracted the star’s gravity.
When the implosion abruptly ceased, the mass and energy of the super-giant red star rebounded, providing enormous heat that sent powerful shockwaves back through the star, out from its core, radiating neutrinos and stardust composed of the heavy elements that make possible the chemistry of life on earth, propelling its plasma into the interstellar medium in the prismatic conflagration of a supernova, a celestial cloud of sparkling hot-white synapses suffusing to electric greens and gold in a display of light more spectacular in appearance yet more subtle in meaning than the message spelled out in the lights illuminated by the souls that had in the Paradiso welcomed Dante to the Circle of Jupiter.
Amid the trillion stars rotating around the black hole at the center of that cluster of celestial energy and mass, a strange duo, two stars in a binary system, an odd couple if you will, in a decaying orbit of inevitable destruction, circled each other as dance partners would in a do-si-do. The smaller star, the hotter of the two, was a spinning neutron star, making five hundred revolutions per second, pulsing beams of radio waves from its poles. Spinning and turning in its dance of death with the neutron star, a cooling supergiant red star, having more than ten times the mass of the sun, pulsed in the throes of its own imminent solar mortality. Stellar winds raging in the photosphere of the colossal star ejected plumes of hydrogen, helium, and heavier elements like gold and platinum into circumstellar rings of metallic oranges, brilliant reds, and vibrant violets, some of which, in a swirling colorful flow, like a rainbow of solar gasses, accreted to the neutron star, dangerously increasing its mass.
I slumped in my seat, pierced by sunlight magnified by the windshield glass. What was I fighting? Everything. I was fighting where I was, who I was, where I was going. I’ll be here now, I thought. I’ll be here, not moving, going nowhere in gridlock on the Santa Monica Freeway. My heartbeat slowed, my muscles relaxed, and my mind, which had been working hard to be elsewhere, focused on where I was, alongside accumulated debris piled against the concrete barrier: a pair of torn trousers, a doll without a head, and a single sneaker that had lost its laces. The shoe had been run over until it was tire-black.
I got out of the Jeep and picked up the shoe. It was just a running shoe, but I held it tenderly, examining it in one hand and then turning it over to examine it in the other. I felt every wound as car after car had run over it, crushing its beauty, rending it into a vague semblance of charcoal canvas.
He stood and stretched, running one hand over the other as if removing an invisible pair of gloves. A lightning flash filled the sky, illuminating the mural in the park. On the left side of the mural an urban landscape of office buildings, factories, and crowded neighborhoods nestled in a web of freeways. On the right side, farmers planted terraces on the outskirts of a Maya village. In the center, a procession of people of all races ascended a glittering spiral staircase. They were led by a tall, regal woman with ebony skin. She wore brightly striped Ethiopian robes and the headdress of a queen – the Queen of Sheba. She held the hand of an African boy – her son, a prince, he imagined, no older than twelve. He felt her other hand reaching out to him. Then, as if summoned, he opened the sliding-glass door, stepped onto the balcony and into a torrent of rain.
Her screensaver – Osceola in ceremonial headdress, his face streaked with red war paint, a rifle held over his head, a blue-and-white checkered sash worn over one shoulder, a red-and-tan shirt tied at his waist, falling like a skirt to his mid thighs, buckskin pants, frozen forever in the frenzied step of a war dance – fades to azure wallpaper patterned with logos of the Department of Justice and an Instant Message from Aurora – can u come up?
She walked out, the front door closing behind her with a whoosh, as if blowing him a kiss.
He wanted to yell, I’ll police the floors for towels. But on the porch he froze in a paralysis that had first gripped him in childhood, riding a carousel pony, his world spinning round and round beyond control like the events of his life— his father killed on the deck of an aircraft carrier; poor grades disqualifying him from playing football his senior year in high school; a hand grenade that was supposed to be disarmed exploding during a training exercise, mortally wounding Andy, who died in his arms; and now this, Hailey passing from his life like a dying breath.
The evening sky twinkles with stars; Venus and Jupiter are visible to the naked eye. The moon is full, the sky cloudless. The soprano hoots of a Great Horned Owl sound nearby. A peregrine falcon, usually a diurnal bird of prey, crashes into a ring-necked duck on the river bank, then flaps its wings, carrying its meal over treetops into the dark heart of the wetlands. An occurrence of the food chain’s eternal return.