According to the front-page photo in the (New York) Daily News, my father was "Murdered Gangland Style." I was three years old.
The assassination was most likely ordered by a mob insurance broker in order to collect on a large life insurance policy that my father provided as collateral for a business loan. After my father’s death, my distraught mother began a downward spiral into substance abuse from which she never recovered. The insurance broker, later convicted of another killing while under witness protection, was never charged with my father’s murder.
Based on those events, I’ve written a time-travel novel, "A Tale of Two Times," about how a middle-aged son battles to save his younger parents’ previously doomed lives.
In present-day Florida, Billy Volante leans against a large oak tree in his backyard, only to keep falling---through the tree into 1961, exactly fifty-six years into the past, into the same Gulf Coast resort town where he now resides and where his parents took winter vacations.
Billy and his free-spirited girlfriend, Carrie Anne, decide to pose as a married couple to warn his young father, Johnny Volante, of the looming 1964 murder. Seeking to build a friendship before revealing his identity, the older Billy takes his father on a fishing trip, only to stumble upon a vacationing mob attorney, Herman Goldman, who will order the future murder.
When Goldman meets Billy, all prior history is rebooted and Billy is forced to ask his father for help as the mob has more pressing ideas about who they want to eliminate first.
Will Johnny Volante believe Billy, a man more than twice his age, is his son and help him fight the mob?
In this rebooted history, if Billy saves his father's life and prevents another murder, what becomes of his future and the future of the girl he loves? Will they even exist in 2017 if they change the past?
Will Goldman complicate things, even more, by eliminating the new target and Billy's father to thwart all of Billy's attempts to change the past for a better future?