The Silver Hook is a novel of life in a small town in the Deep South where key citizens fall prey to their own personal desires and weaknesses in order to escape the severe limitations of their environment. The town’s fragile balance is rocked by the arrival of a wealthy older Spanish aristocrat with both his own unique method of satisfying his personal desires and the wealth to achieve his needs. Nineteen year old John Jameson is caught up in the old man’s lethal web as the book opens. One by one, other major citizens succumb to their own unique hidden desires for sex outside the bounds of propriety or the power of stolen money and property.
Within the Town of Creole each character is forced to wrestle with the consequences of his or her own actions taken to relieve the smothering constraints of the town environment. In the process the characters are hooked into their own self-inflicted consequences. Ultimately the true nature and value of the characters own self-perception as well as the limitations imposed by religious and moral standards of the town are challenged. With accelerating speed, Creole’s tenuous hold on its citizen’s is destroyed.
The town’s self-constructed barriers are finally ripped open near the end of the novel as outside federal law enforcements elements arrive to deal with the death and larceny which has erupted through Creole’s fragile outer protective shell. Neither the town nor its citizens will ever regain the calm outer tranquility which marked their carefully constructed previous image as the ideal southern environment in which to live, raise the perfect family, construct the ideal personal image and die.
The novel provides a protected environment in which the reader may inspect and perhaps question real personal desires and needs. Whether or not each of us possesses some of the same as yet unchallenged feelings or impulses experienced by the characters in the fictional town of Creole is a question posed by this book. What would you as a reader do if presented the opportunity for what you thought was a completely protected intimate encounter with a married desirable member of the opposite sex? Would you refuse or would you step into the trap as did several characters in the fictional town of Creole?
Also, all of us can probably truthfully say that if we found a small sum of money and knew who had lost it that we would immediately return it to the rightful owner. However, in your most private of thoughts if you truly believed you could duplicate “The Silver Hook” character Felix’s embezzlement of several million dollars with absolutely no chance of discovery would you take the hook? Also, this author is confident that none of my readers has ever coveted a friend’s husband or wife – or have you? As the author of “The Silver Hook”, I simply have presented the vehicle in which you may travel and develop your own honest answers in total privacy and enjoyment. Travel safely as you read!!!