Life on and Off the Beat

It is the mid 1960's thru the mid 1970's. The place is NYC. The atmosphere is thick with overhanging clouds of cultural upheaval and racial confrontation.

Into this world are dragged brother and sister Julio and Rosa Marino, pawns in a child-welfare scam. Plucked from a rural Puerto Rico orphanage administered by care giving nuns, the are relocated to a treeless concrete jungle surrounded by predators or every ilk.

But this isn't just Julio and Rosa's story. It is also the story of a generation caught up in civil rights upheaval, immigration influx and anti Viet Nam war protesters. It is the story of ethnic urbanites and escapee suburbanites trying to preserve their post war development... their schools ... their corner candy stores and the shopping malls that exemplify their new-found middle class.

It is the story of Eddie Palmer, a Black detective trying to resolve making it in the White world without targeting his contemporaries in the Black ghetto. Benny Valdez, a chosen exemplar in the quest to bring more of the swelling Latino population into the uniformed services, but ends up with personal baggage that outweighs what the system can absorb. And Police Captain Nino Angolotti, Precinct Commander and designated integrator of political hiring pressures, who is determined to keep his shrinking ethnic neighborhood intact... notwithstanding the increased crime and poverty plus an invasive foreign language encroaching its boundaries.

'Life In and Off the Beat' is a smorgasbord of loves, lives and gut-wrenching circumstantial encounters for an array of characters finding themselves in the same melting pot ready to boil over.

Roth spent over 40 years writing advertising and promotion copy for corporate and ad agency clients. Asked why it took him so long to try his hand at fiction, he quickly responds; When I was younger, I was busy climbing career mountains. Now that I've taken quite a few steps on the downward side, my vision is more perceptive and my memory more reflective. I like to think of myself as a pretty damn good wordsmith. With luck and perseverance, maybe someday I will also consider myself a pretty damn good write.