In the midst of an agency-mandated archaeological study, it isn’t uncommon for a real estate developer to be saddled with unwelcome finds: “Never like this – one mass burial site. And there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. No beads, jewelry, scraps of clothing, buttons. Not one single article of any kind to help identify them. Valerie, they were clean as a whistle.” Without digging any deeper (hint), Yersinia pestis, the bacillus of bubonic plague, is stable in cadavers for long periods of time, leaving clues and making it possible to detect variations, i.e., the lab strain.

We all have our own wars to fight – and we don’t always pick them. Some of them pick us.

For the time being, that’s as far as I should take you. Why play spoiler with my own story?

But what I will do is give you a taste of the story with character-driven excerpts. You’ll hear from two of them now and some others in the days and weeks to come. In the last week of August, contemporaneously with the launching of Songs For the Deaf, I will be providing you with excerpts from the first sixteen chapters—one chapter a day for sixteen days. If you’re not running to your favorite bookstore or purchasing it on your Kindle by then, so be it. But why waste your time, as I’m sure you often do, grappling with a book that you are not enjoying?