Ashes

By: Bernard Lewis Rottschaefer, MD

Uli is excited having discovered scores of previously unsuspected relatives upon receiving his Ancestry.com DNA results. Before Uli has a chance to meet his new relations, he is arrested for a 1964 murder of a Pennsylvania State Trooper during a bank robbery. Ashes is a fast-moving, delightful melding between fiction and nonfiction, which includes snippets from an actual federal case that lays open the innermost workings of the federal criminal justice system.

Caught in the Machiavellian clutches of a federal criminal prosecution, Uli leads the reader through an illuminating journey across the United States and even into Cuba. His trials sow the seeds for serious seldom foreseen downsides to the almost vertical legal playing field favoring the prosecution. Ashes provides insight into how excessive prosecutorial tilting may inadvertently strengthen the Constitutional survivalist paramilitary groups.

Ashes brings to light the horrific fact that eight percent of American adult citizens are convicted felons-by far the highest percentage for any civilized nation-and explains to the reader how and why less than one percent of federal criminally indicted defendants are found not guilty.

Ashes is a fictional read that brings to sharp focus areas of the federal criminal justice system which have been carefully concealed just beneath the surface, employing an enjoyable fictional storyline that will thoroughly entertain any reader irrespective as to whether they are concerned about justice or not.

About the Author

Bernard Lewis Rottschaefer, MD, is the author of ANAK, East Greenbush, and Ashes.