WITH THESE HANDS

About the Book

WITH THESE HANDS is a fictional novel. John Delana, the central character loses his mother at the tender age of four. The story begins at her graveside ceremony where he, his father and his two younger brothers pay their final respects.

John's family is first generation Sicilian-American. Their heritage can easily be traced back to the 17th Century through the rise and power of the original Mafia family and beyond. Their concepts and purposes in life are deeply ingrained. This particular family treasures its history and passes along to each succeeding generation all the power and wisdom it possesses.

There is more to the Delana family than simple family cohesion. Within the family is a commitment spanning centuries to a mystical power, a spiritual gift that is passed on through the first-born male child. Each first-born son must come to understand this power and its rightful use in order to pass it on to future generations or it may skip several generations. The power is a spiritual gift of healing. It restores the injured, suffering or dying, be they people, plants or animals, to new health and vitality. As each generation comes to understand the powers behind the gift, it also begins to understand the price extracted by this spiritual channel and how, in the end, this price must be paid.

John Delana rebels against his family at the age of fifteen. He escapes the tyranny and cruelty of an abusive stepmother and flees to New York, believing that he killed his stepmother. He soon discovers that life on the seamy side of the city is filled with another type of oppression.

His first night is spent on a park bench surrounded by the human dregs of the city. He awakens to find his shoes missing and the only money he had, gone. A stranger befriends him in sympathy and takes him to a seedy hotel where the man cleans for a living and it is here where John's experience with drunks, drugs, gangsters and whores makes him want to go home and face the consequences.

He returns home to the family who love him and attempts to restart the life he had. His experiences in the big city devoured his youth and replaced his innocence with an awareness of life’s harshness beyond his years.

A choice between enlisting in the Navy or facing a jail sentence sends John into the Navy where he becomes a boxing champion. After the navy he returns home to inherit the mantle of Mafia prince. Because of this, his education expands dramatically in his quest to control his family's businesses.

As fate allows, John finds the choices to be made and the challenges of life more difficult to adjust to and overcome. With his best friend, Carmen, he sets out to collect "dues for the family" from a Rhode Island restaurant. A fight ensues and a hoodlum suffers an accidental death. John is blamed and an unjust manslaughter conviction takes him away from his young wife and newborn baby. The judge, bent on abolishing organized crime, sentences John to serve fifteen years in prison.

While in prison, his grief over a family tragedy overwhelms him, changing his behavior, which turns so bad he is put first in isolation then in solitary confinement. Months after the events that put him there, John transforms himself mentally through two amazing changes that help him to reorganize his life. One change is inspired by his experiences with a fellow inmate, an Oriental Martial Arts Master. With this mentor, John develops a new and unique martial arts style he named Self-Offense.

John becomes involved in a near fatal scientific experiment that nonetheless, awakens in him the special ancestral gift of power. This new awareness changes his behavior dramatically for the better. Because he volunteered for the experiment, his time is reduced and after serving seven years he is paroled.  He emerges from prison a very different man. Certain stipulations to his parole require John to work and assist in a home for troubled and wayward boys in New Yor

About the Author

The author, John C. Pace, much like the leading character of his first novel, is a man of many dimensions. Those who know him best often describe him as a colorful and unforgettable character. While his book, “With These Hands”, is far from autobiographical, the author shares his own strengths and weaknesses as well as some of his life experiences with several of his characters. Perhaps when authoring a first novel this is somewhat inevitable. A collage of his life shows him often as a man at odds with himself as well as society and the law. He became a young champion boxer, then a martial artist who developed and taught his own “style” of the arts, and later the founder and CEO of a successful sales company. Now he has turned to pen and paper, re-directing his natural story telling ability as a writer.