By Michael Vines
[Paperback]
 
“A wildly ambitious novel, both plot-wise and thematically. I was completely captivated by how all the pieces came together. Laugh-out-loud funny. It really is brilliant.”
        --T. Greenwood, author of The Still Point, Keeping Lucy, and Two Rivers

Joe Keller, a creative director at a New York advertising agency, has long been conflicted about telling lies for corporate clients. When he gets a new assignment where even the “reason to believe” the product benefit is a lie, it seems that things have hit rock bottom.

They haven’t. For there are also problems on the home front. His gifted, but rebellious sixteen-year-old daughter rejects her upper-middle class values and religion when she falls under the thrall of a boy aligned with an idiosyncratic Christian cult. His non-believing son prepares for his bar mitzvah but is hormonally incapable of focusing on anything but his older sister’s sexy, shallow girlfriend. And Joe seems to have lost all passion, even for his wife Linda who is constantly seeking to seal herself off from the assaults of the outside world.

The various story lines and subplots, including Joe’s discovery that he is an unwitting pawn in a scheme to defraud his client, overlap and resolve in a surprising, rollicking climax at the boy’s bar mitzvah.
 
About the author
Michael Vines was born in St. Louis and received his Master’s degree in English from Columbia University. After grad school he began a career in advertising working as a copywriter and Creative Director for several of New York’s most renowned global agencies. He continues to live in New York City with his wife where he enjoys reading, writing, cooking, playing blues and rock guitar, and following politics and the St. Louis Cardinals.