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| About the Book | |
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Free Excerpt From The Book (requires Adobe Reader) Set in the coal fields of southern West Virginia, The Pie Man is the story of two people from different cultures, brought together by unique circumstances. In each other, they see an opportunity for a new beginning but the clock is ticking on their time together and surprising events, along with their own morality, threaten the fulfillment of their dreams.Natty Oakes is a 31-year old high school dropout and mother of a twelve-year-old boy with Down Syndrome and a name from a nursery rhyme. Struggling to save her marriage and support her family, Natty finds her only solace in running, and coaching her always undermanned soccer team The Bones. Going into their last season before high school, The Bones – even with Emma Lowe, the best U-14 soccer player in the country, playing on a boys’ team – are the perpetual doormats of their league. Now a new struggle is enveloping Natty, in the form of mountaintop – removal coal mining and its imminent destruction of her grandparents’ farm on Angel Mountain. In the decimated economy of McDowell County, Natty knows that she will be virtually alone against family and friends in her fight against the CanAmex Energy Company and their powerful Charleston law firm. The loss of the Angel Mountain seems inevitable. Until an unlikely ally emerges. Charlie Burden is wealthy and educated, a partner at Dietrich Delahunt & Mackey, one of the largest engineering firms in the world, headquartered on Park Avenue in New York City. Husband of the beautiful and ambitious, Ellen Burden, father of two successful grown children, with a beautiful home in Mamaroneck, and a rising position in the country club hierarchy of Westchester County, the Burdens have achieved success. But the obsession with wealth and the country club life style have for several years, been slowly, inexorably, suffocating Charlie – a blue collar kid from the wrong side of the tracks in New Haven. No longer a field engineer since his relationship to Duncan McCord – his old college hockey teammate at Michigan, and now CEO of the CanAmex Energy Company – made Charlie a rainmaker and partner at his company, Charlie’s professional career and income level took off while his job became vacuous and unfulfilling. With confirmation of his wife’s long-suspected infidelity, Charlie finally sets a plan in motion to save his self-esteem, his career and his marriage. His scheme unwittingly results in his transfer to the field to build a huge coal-fired power plant for the company’s largest client, the CanAmex Energy Company, in Red Bone, West Virginia. In West Virginia, Charlie meets a little boy and his mother and soon gets caught up in a personal drama and a surprising web of corporate intrigue that will threaten his career and the survival of his company. Charlie’s relationship with Natty, the fight to save Angel Mountain, and The Bones incredible season, all come to a head during the prestigious, season-ending soccer tournament in Charleston, when an unthinkable tragedy – like so many coal mining disasters afflicted on the people of West Virginia – will alter the future and the dreams of everyone in Red Bone.
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| About the Author | |
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GERRY FITZGERALD has owned his own advertising agency for the last 25 years in Springfield, Massachusetts. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism/Northwestern University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and is a Viet Nam veteran. He lives in East Longmeadow, MA with his wife Robin and children Thomas and Joanna. |
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