The first volume of four, "The Long Fall" introduces Bill Maitland, a short, fat, balding Assistant in the Florida State Attorney’s Office in Jacksonville, Florida in 2005. He is married to Debbie Maitland-Bascomb, a tall, gorgeous, blonde Associate Professor of Economics at the University of North Florida (UNF) in Jacksonville.
Over the past five years Maitland has lost touch with his wife and two children as the demands of his job have swallowed up his personal life.
He is, despite the demands of the job, an ignorantly happy man until the night his wife utters four fatal words. That Freudian slip unleashes his pit-bull instincts upon his wife and results in a discovery that changes both their lives forever.
In the courtroom, Maitland will face baby killers and stone cold drug lords, mercy killers and deadly grannies, killer cops and drug cartels.
Against these and all odds, Maitland is armed only with a superb legal mind, the powers of the prosecutor’s office, bulldog stubbornness and a compulsion to do the right thing no matter what the cost. And a basic decency that gives him surprising allies from the Florida underworld to a Colombian crime cartel.
And in the wake of a bitter divorce, Debbie Maitland-Bascomb will dump Maitland for a gorgeous young stud, but will find that beauty is not a shield against pain and loneliness, and that it is harder to walk away from Maitland than she expected it to be.
When We Were Married, Volume 2: Second Acts
BETRAYAL, DIVORCE AND COURTHOUSE MAYHEM WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING.
Four words ended their marriage.
In the wake of those four words, the 18-year marriage of Jacksonville Assistant State Attorney William Maitland and University of North Florida Professor Debbie Maitland ends in a painful divorce.
As Volume Two begins, Maitland faces the greatest challenge of his professional life as he must stand against the African American community, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and his own boss in his prosecution of a heroic black cop who killed three men during a home invasion.
AND he must decide whether to undertake a court case he almost certainly cannot win against a cold blooded murderer who beat his ex-wife and his unborn son to death.
AND he must prepare for a possible prosecution of a kingpin in a Mexican drug cartel.
But for their part, the shadowy men in Mexico must decide if they are prepared to take on “The Angel of Death,” as Maitland has become known.
And they will soon find they are challenging a man at whose back stands a deadly criminal organization.
The Colombian Crime cartel is headed by the legendary Old Man. And if they strike at Maitland, the Colombian crime lord has put the Mexicans on notice that he can and will reach into the deserts of Mexico to strike at their heart.
In his personal life, Maitland has transformed himself from the flabby couch potato who lost the love and lust of his wife, Debbie Maitland/Bascomb, to a younger man.
But he now finds himself facing the question of what to do about Aline des-Jardins, the married French woman he has fallen in love with.
Aline has followed him to Jacksonville. He walked away from her once before, because she is married to a French federal prosecutor he considers a friend.
But now that Aline is in Jacksonville, can Maitland send her away again? Can he do the right thing, especially when he isn’t sure anymore what the right thing is?
While Maitland is preoccupied with professional challenges and Aline’s presence, Debbie is finding that beauty is no shield against loneliness and pain.
A woman who has never lacked for male attention, in the wake of her divorce she’s lost a husband and a lover, is estranged from her children, besieged by would-be seducers, and trying to find her footing in a new career.
She’s done what she knows to be the right thing in seeking a life apart from Bill Maitland, but doing the right thing hasn’t protected her from psychosomatic illnesses, nightmares involving a dead aunt, and emotional distress that leads her to the office of empathetic psychiatrist Dr. Ernst Teller.
As she tries to understand why she can’t break the emotional ties to a man she believes left her long before she left him, she finds herself becoming increasingly closer to writer Clint Abbott.
As the world of crime and brutal violence circles closer to their life in Jacksonville, Bill Maitland and Debbie Bascomb are learning that sometimes being divorced and apart can be as painful and confusing as being trapped in an unhappy marriage.
Is it possible to have a Second Act in two lives ripped apart by neglect and obsession and betrayal and lies? Or is it too late to ever go back?
YOU CAN FIND THESE NOVELS AT:
Amazon
When We were Married, Volume 1
When We Were Married, Volume 2
Smashwords
When We Were Married, Volume 1
When We Were Married, Volume 2
Barnes and Noble
When We Were Married, Volume 1
When We Were Married, Volume 2
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