Publisher's Synopsis
Belle Rio is the memory of love, the gravity of passion, the inevitability of blood, and the irony of fate.
"The Passion of Belle Rio" is characterized as dark, comic, pulp fiction smothered in melancholy."
Isolated on the Florida Gulf Coast - Belle Rio is as beautiful and passionate, as it is dangerous and violent.
In a politically charged atmosphere, the past collides with the on-rushing future. Approval of the Net Ban Amendment in the '94 election guarantees collapse of the gulf coast seafood industry, an explosion of expensive resort condos & yacht marinas, and the irreversible tide of tourism. Years of racial tension explodes in one terrible night of hate and despair, the tragic consequence of a desperate secret passion.
By the time the truth is revealed, no one wants to hear it.
Life in Paradise will never be the same.
Attorney Matthew McCutcheon, recently divorced, his life in shambles, is lost in Belle Rio, haunted by the memory of his mother disappointed in love, and the father he never knew.
Andrew Percy, owner of Cleopatra's Temple of Love, a Panama City strip club is caught between Jai-Lai gamblers & Miami gangsters.
These two men are unaware of the past they share.
Liana Cates, the "Wandering Venus", a cheap Ava Gardner imitation, and her daughter, Terri the Pirate, searching for her Destiny on the Wheel of Fortune, are both seductive and dangerous.
Patriarch "Bud" Hardaway, whose passion for life will destroy everyone around him, is larger than the world he inhabits. He joins with Attorney, Francois Taghert, who exudes the fear of forbidden knowledge, in devouring as much of Paradise as possible.
And the Reverend Carlton Thomas, descendant of Renegade Indians and Runaway Free Negroes, sanctifies the Sugar Bowl hero, Cleve Thomas, the New Deion.
"For Matthew McCutcheon, in the clouds at twenty thousand feet, the world seemed unnecessarily cumbersome and meaningless: the awesome power of the state apparatus, developed over centuries of Roman jurisprudence and English common law, and the technical enumeration of data that constructed the bleak tabloid image of anger, love, and violence, and reproduced the moment of death in magnificent detail. All this mingled with the droning flight above the Windy City, balanced precariously on the edge of the ice-crystal Lake Michigan.
Attorney McCutcheon realized that he feared, deep in his heart, the possibilities of the battle-scarred, blood-stained trailer, where the passion and the promise of love had to be scrapped from the trailer walls with the delicate instruments of a morbid, but curious technology. In that detailed, chronicled moment, there was actual proof that somebody meant something to somebody, beyond all measure of reason. And it was for that reason that he hated the law, first and foremost: because too often there was too much reason, when there was no reason at all, and not enough passion when passion was all that mattered."
