NOVELS BY JOSEPH SCIUTO

A seismic shift in Hollywood's power structure occurred during the 1980s.

Gone were the moguls and founding fathers of the motion picture industry -- Jack L. Warner, Louis B. Mayer, Carl Laemmle, Samuel Goldwyn, and Darryl Zanuck.

The studios were being taken over by technological giants such as Sony and Panasonic, and the new owners turned to lawyers and talent agents to run their newly obtained properties.

In 1982, an aspiring young screenwriter, Nick Caggiano, moves from the Bronx to Los Angeles, hoping to find work in the industry.

Joe Rossetti is a marketing guru, the very best in the business. His motto is: "It's okay if I know it's a lie, as long as my target audience believes the lie and buys the product."

It's a simple maxim to live by and he has made a lot money.  But one night, standing at the bar at The Smoke House Restaurant located on the Los Angeles-Burbank border, he meets Nancy, a brilliant  mathematician with the face of a goddess,

Like a bolt of unexpected lightning, Nancy challenges everything Joe thinks he believes. 

Hollywood. Las Vegas. Beverly Hills. A world of corrupt movie moguls, heartless kidnappers, and innocent girls sold into slavery by their own families.

When wounded Kentucky-born beauty Nicole Tyler ditches her handlers in Las Vegas and sets out to avenge the death of her best friend, her bloody rampage threatens a powerful network of kidnappers and shady businessmen who will stop at nothing to protect their own interests.   

Bent on toppling their illegal enterprise and determined to save her sister from becoming its latest victim...

Joe is the successful screenwriter behind a series of blockbuster movies, but his personal life is in shambles. He hasn't had a date in over eighteen years, and his relationship with the daughter he raised by himself has gone off the rails. 

His grasp of what’s really important shifts from the make-believe world of the movies to the everlasting hope that we can all make a positive difference for those fighting just to live.

"Never let the fear of striking out keep you from coming up to bat."
...BABE RUTH

As the beloved, hard-working general manager of a Major League Baseball team in California, "Baseball Wizard" Joe Ciotola has given his life to the sport but lost too much in the bargain. 

Joe meets Mia, a pitiful creature whose future has been written by the town's leaders, and who can't stay without making the ultimate sacrifice. 

The choices Joe and Mia make together, and the bonds they create with another woman who emerges from Joe's past, shape their lives forever, revealing the power of connections formed from the ashes of great loss.

A POWERFUL POLITICAL NOVEL RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES AND WRAPPED IN A  LOVE STORY

It  is late winter, 2020, and Nick has been pulled out of the CIA's Kabul  office and sent to Paris for what sounds like a simple assignment.  Posing as a graduate student at a local polytechnic institute, his task  is to build a case against Abdul Haqq, a brilliant engineering student  suspected of building bombs for Hezbollah.

What should be an  open-and-shut case soon becomes a tangled mess as Nick finds himself  drawn into a friendship with the charismatic young engineer, then falls  hard for Abdul's adopted sister, the beautiful but troubled art student  with a tragic past, Gabrielle. 

THE PAST CAN EITHER BE YOUR POISON, OR YOUR TUTOR.   

Native New Yorker Joe Caggiano moved to Los Angeles in the 1980s with a dream to make it big in the movie business. Instead, like millions of young hopefuls, he spent 30 years working in the restaurant business.   

An avid reader with multiple advanced degrees but no instinct for self-promotion, Joe watched his dreams fritter away while others in his circle achieved their goals and, in some cases, made the world a better place. Now suddenly unemployed, Joe seems destined to spend the rest of his life on the sidelines, until a chance meeting with a bright young girl turns everything around.   

Thanks to an angel-faced orphan on the run from an abusive foster home, Joe embarks on a path of discovery, happiness, and enlightenment that promises to far outshine any of the Hollywood dreams that originally brought him to the City of Angels.