For the Love of Paris

To a passerby strolling Boulevard St. Germain, the man and woman ensconced at the café table could be lovers. In truth, they are nearly strangers, an American writer recording the wartime experiences of a dying Frenchwoman. Christine came of age in Paris in 1937, embarking upon a series of love affairs and a career as a journalist in the glittering city of lights, living in true French fashion, with irrepressible *joie de vivre*...even as Adolf Hitler's fascist regime begins its march into France. When Christine pens a series of articles criticizing the appeasement of the Germans, she draws the ire of Nazi spies. Her Jewish husband is arrested, leaving Christine with a brutal choice: succumb to a liaison with a Nazi General or forfeit her life and that of her family. As this intriguing novel unfolds, Christine's deep courage and unfaltering faith in the face of overwhelming odds becomes an object lesson in the importance of individual choice and the power of love and forgiveness. This second edition contains adult language and situations. An Abrideged version is available with the same title: For the Love of Paris - Abridged. The Abridged version does not contain adult language.

This is Tom's first novel but he has been a writer all of his life. He was conceived in Chicago, Illinois during the Battle of the Bulge and born just two days after the final surrender that marked the end of World War II in 1945. He was birthed from the Greatest Generation and listened to the stories of WWII and their unambiguous definitions of right and wrong but he grew up in the sixies in a nebulous wolrd of searching and dreaming. Tom's mother was Inez Pizzica (deseased), a first generation Italian-American whose family is from areas near Pescara and Sulmona in the Abruzzo Provence. His father is Harold Rutter (ninety-seven years old!) whose English/German family has an American connection back to the early American settlers in Baltimore, Maryland. Tom first traveled to Paris in the summer of 1967, when he fell in love with the City of Lights. He has been drawn back to her many times and will live there someday. He is eternally grateful to those who prevented Hitler from destroying Paris in August 1944 though he doubts the validity of the official version of that event. The professions which took Tom away from his creative side were many years as a student financial aid administrator (UC Davis, UC San Diego and San Francisco State University), associate vice president for Enrollment Planning and Management at San Francisco State University and as the chief financial officer for a San Francisco law firm. During the writing of For the Love of Paris, Tom visited Paris often and lived in Montalcino, Italy and Mill Valley, California, with his wife Donna Marie (Lumia) and their daughter Justine. Tom has two grown children, Matthew and Caroline; a daughter-ion-law Courtney Murren and twin four-year-old grandchildren, John Solomon Rutter and Maria Sophia Rutter. For the Love of Paris emerged from Tom's mind as he sat on a bench along the Champs-Elysees reading Alistair Horne's Seven Ages of Paris in March 2007. The initial story was transmitted to his wife Donna via his BlackBerry in a series of e-mails as he walked the Paris streets and sat in her cafes.