Per Verse Vengeance

Hollywood producer and recent military man,, Nick Righetti, waits for friends at  his favorite bar when he is hit by a blonde thunderbolt in a red dress.

Nicole Tyler, high-class call girl and all-around tough cookie, spurns Nick's advances. She is on a mission to avenge her best friend's death and rescue her little sister from being sold into prostitution.

A child driven by heartbreak, treated like yesterday's trash to be thrown out when no longer useful.

A woman driven by vengeance.  I was sold into prostitution, sending me down a road with no return.

I became a student saved by poetry.

A lover saved by true love.

All of these people, for better or worse, are me.

I'm Nicole Tyler.

My best friend couldn't roll with the punches. Abused by one too many disgusting men, she decided to take her own life. The tragedy turned me into a one-woman vengeance machine.

The Las Vegas mobsters who are following Nicole have other plans for the blonde beauty. To bad for them that they drew the short straw.

Despite the efforts of her guard-dog mobsters, bodies are turning up all over Las Vegas.

...to the other, mobsters are turning up dead.

Is it the vengeful vamp or "the competition?"

And your obnoxious associates in a car rigged with a bomb.

After a certain blonde fills you full of lead. You'll get blood all over the pool.

Don't turn your back on reality. Face your problems head-on. Let others help you. And above all, always believe in yourself.

Shakespeare said, “True love cannot be found where it truly does not exist, nor can it be hidden where it truly does.”

Joseph Sciuto's blog expressing his perceptions, commentary, book reviews, observations and insights.

Eighteen-year-old Joe has taken a serious bump to the head, and  his beloved  girlfriend, Angie, has landed on the wrong side of the law  as a result of an untenable situation.

How is a young couple supposed to start a life together when one of them is behind bars and the other is too immature to cope?

Enter Mr. Laurence, a mysterious veteran and charming philanthropist who brings magic and healing wherever he goes.

Beloved  in the Long Island enclave where he continues his in-laws' mission to  save endangered children, Mr. Laurence and his scintillating wife,  Isabelle, take Joe under their wing and help the young man chart a new  direction toward success.

Native New Yorker Joe Caggiano moved to Los Angeles in the 1980s  with a dream to make it big in the movie business. Instead, like  millions of young hopefuls, he spent 30 years working in the restaurant  business. 

An avid reader with multiple advanced degrees but no  instinct for self-promotion, Joe watched his dreams fritter away while  others in his circle achieved their goals and, in some cases, made the  world a better place. Now suddenly unemployed, Joe seems destined to  spend the rest of his life on the sidelines, until a chance meeting with  a bright young girl turns everything around. 

Thanks to an  angel-faced orphan on the run from an abusive foster home, Joe embarks  on a path of discovery, happiness, and enlightenment that promises to  far outshine any of the Hollywood dreams that originally brought him to  the City of Angels.

"Never let the fear of striking out keep you from coming up to bat." ...BABE RUTH

As  the beloved, hard-working general manager of a Major League Baseball  team in California, "Baseball Wizard" Joe Ciotola has given his life to  the sport but lost too much in the bargain. 

Joe  meets Mia, a pitiful creature whose future has been written by the  town's leaders, and who can't stay without making the ultimate  sacrifice. 

The  choices Joe and Mia make together, and the bonds they create with  another woman who emerges from Joe's past, shape their lives forever,  revealing the power of connections formed from the ashes of great loss.

Joe  is the successful screenwriter behind a series of blockbuster movies,  but his personal life is in shambles. He hasn't had a date in over  eighteen years, and his relationship with the daughter he raised by  himself has gone off the rails. 
 

Once  a sweet and affectionate child, Sofia's personality changed  dramatically in her early teens, and her increasingly explosive,  irrational behavior has wreaked havoc on Joe's family back home in the  Bronx.

Joe's  grasp of what’s really important shifts from the make-believe world of  the movies to the everlasting hope that we can all make a positive  difference for those fighting just to live.

Hollywood.  Vegas. Beverly Hills. A world of corrupt movie moguls, heartless  kidnappers and girls sold into slavery by their own families.

When  Nicole Tyler ditches her handlers in Las Vegas and sets out to avenge  the death of her best friend, her bloody rampage threatens a powerful  network of kidnappers who will stop at nothing to protect their own  interests.   
 

Bent on toppling their illegal enterprise and determined to save her sister from becoming its latest victim...

Joe Rossetti is a marketing guru, the very best in the business. His motto is: "It's okay if I know it's a lie, as long as my target audience believes the lie and buys the product."
 

It's  a simple maxim to live by and he has made a lot money.  But one night,  standing at the bar at The Smoke House Restaurant located on the Los  Angeles-Burbank border, he meets Nancy, a brilliant  mathematician with  the face of a goddess,
 

Like a bolt of unexpected lightning, Nancy challenges everything Joe thinks he believes.

Eerily mirroring today's headlines...

A seismic shift in Hollywood's power structure occurred during the 1980s.

Gone  were the moguls and founders of the motion picture industry -- Jack L.  Warner, Louis B. Mayer, Carl Laemmle, Samuel Goldwyn, and Darryl Zanuck.
 

The  studios were being taken over by technological giants such as Sony and  Panasonic, and the new owners turned to lawyers and talent agents to run  their newly obtained properties.
 

In  1982, an aspiring young screenwriter, Nick Caggiano, moves from the  Bronx to Los Angeles, hoping to find work in the industry.

Husband and wife novelists, Joseph Sciuto and Melissa J. L. Smith, have collaborated for the first time on a series of fictionalziaed short stories about family and the ties that bind. 

Sciuto, the grandson of Italian immigrants, and Smith, whose descendents arrived over 100 years before the Revolutionary War, would not seem, on paper at least, to have much in common in family traditions.

But both were fortunate enough to have their grandmothers living in with them. While their approaches were different, the outcome was the same. Love is the prevalent theme and the stories show that the more different we are, the more the alike we may be.