This Side Of Forever

This Side Of Forever begins in 1975. Robert Hadley’s wife Megan has met an untimely death in an airplane crash. Her death devastates Robert rendering him unable to stay in Villefranche, Sur-Mer on the French Riviera where they had spent many happy years, so he returns to the sea beginning a nomadic journey to rediscover his life. When his wanderings take him back to New York where it all began, he decides to try to build a new life on land again. This new life entails running into an old shipmate from the Navy a retired cop named Desmond Molloy who, with his wife Chandler, owns a very popular midtown Manhattan bar called Le Café Cosmo, the same name as their hangout on the Riviera. Their concerns become mutual when Molloy, needing a manager, hires Robert who needs a job. Along the way, Robert meets a plethora of fascinating street characters, some with pipedream's guiding their lives and others with no dreams at all, just despair from lives going nowhere. There's even a chance at new love when Robert meets Cora, a bartender he becomes enamored of, though even that has its difficulties. But all that comes to a halt when one night in an after-hours club an attempt is made on his life. Initially thinking it is because of a confrontation he had in the bar with his attacker, he later finds out it is part of old vengeance being carried out by his nemesis from the past Don Pietro Orsini of Genoa. When he finds out another friend from that time is dead from a mysterious car accident, Robert realizes that the past will never be put to rest unless he goes back to confront the Don and end it once and for all. Following that, with Molloy as a reluctant volunteer and Chandler a wife with misgivings, Robert and he go back to the Riviera they both once knew. Back in New York, Chandler must deal with her own problems when the notorious Westies, finding out the bar is vulnerable with Molloy gone, begin their own reign of terror that leaves some dead and others emotionally scarred for life. The novel goes between Europe and New York and comes to a conclusion that none see coming when the truth is finally revealed.