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eBook Category: Romance
eBook Description: It is 1993 and Raf Frataleon, at the pinnacle of his career, is ready to retire as CEO of the family business, Frataleon, Inc., which his father had started right after the end of WWII. After the onset of his father's terminal illness, in 1975, he unwearyingly gives up his right to live a normal life, as other men do. Gullibly and naively he spends the better part of his adult life developing the business bringing it from a moderate aircraft after parts manufacturing company into the largest, most prestigious, family owned company of its kind in the world. Coincidental to his decision to retire comes the news of his mother's impeding death from a near life long illness. The tragic loss of his father three years before had left his mother as the sole owner of Frataleon, Inc. But that fact had never worried Raf. There had always been a spoken understanding between he and his parents that the fruits of his labor would always be his. After her death, every thing he had preserved and built upon would automatically be his. Unknown to him however, his much younger sister Nicole disagrees with that arrangement. What follows is her plot to disembowel her brother's inheritance and claim it as her own. How is he to save himself from a fate he could never have imagined could have happened? Can he come out of his misfortune intact? He finds that his strength to financially survive his unexpected reversal of fortunes comes from unexpected sources. Throughout the five E-Novels, we follow Raf as he moves from his earliest childhood, into his traumatic years growing up and on through the trials and tribulations of his adult life. We watch as he prospers and approaches his mid-life. From that perspective, we understand the forces that, unknown to him, propel him, step by step, into his final situation.

eBook Publisher: 4 Points Press Publishing Company/4 Points Press Publishing Company, Published: 2001
Fictionwise Release Date: February 2003

Available eBook Formats:
All formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
Microsoft Reader ISBN: 1591180007

"The Oedipus Syndrome is an ambitious series of novels from first time fiction writer Maria Giusto. The novel explores the binds of loyalty, whether for good or for bad, that tie a family together. In her first two novels of the Oedipus Series, Blind Intentions and Betrayed Innocence, the author introduces us to Raf Frataleon, who deftly presents us with the dynamics of his family and what he thinks his extreme loyalty to them might have cost him. It is rare that an author digs as deeply into a man's psyche as this author does almost tearing the main character apart leaving him to put himself back together again. Raf takes us with him on a journey of his life hardly traveled by men of lesser courage and fortitude than he possesses. He privies us to every facet of his life and lets us share in every part of his emotions. With the great intensity of a comic storyteller, you will laugh when he laughs. With the great sorrow of a holy man observing the decline of his followers, you will cry when he cries. With the openness of a bon vivant you will love as he loves, deeply, passionately and obsessively. Benevolent to a fault, you would yet pale at the depth of his hatred when he is crossed. Profound and enormous in its scope, his anger could bring him and his to destruction. Written with the intensity of his need to expose his inner self, the first novel, Blind Intentions let's Raf take a second look at his present life. The second novel, Betrayed Innocence, is in contrast to the first. In a flashback, we travel with him into his childhood where we share, in another time and another place, the events that write the foundation of his life-script. The first novels will keep you spellbound and you will want to meet Raf again in the upcoming third novel, a continuation of his ambitions and setbacks that dictate his life."--Publisher's Review

But she knew her place: She only called him me darlin' boy in private, Mister Raf in the outer offices, Mister Frataleon at business meetings, but never by his cultural title, Don Ramon, which was reserved for his personal staff. 'Don' was the title that he had inherited from his father, Don Cece', when he had passed away three years before. And it was he who had nicknamed him Raf using the first letters of his formal names, Ramon Antonio Frataleon. When he was born, during the Second World War years, it was the Mezo-American cultural fashion for parents to hand out nicknames to their children. It gave them character and identity, his father had said. Half-smiling Raf remembered how much he had hated his nickname when he was a young boy. In the middle of that thought came the memories of his father's last painful years. Lately, everytime those thoughts crossed his mind, Raf would sink into a pensive state that would take him at least fifteen minutes to banish; it hadn't surprised him that he was still grieving the loss of his father.

Raf was tired, very tired but not yet exhausted. Also, of late, since his last trip to Choluteca, Honduras that January, to celebrate his grandmother Dominica's eighty-third birthday, he seemed to feel beyond fatigued at the end of every day but more especially at the end of a normal workday. And what's more, now and again, self-commiseration had been creeping into his trains of thoughts but he never felt the need to complain about them. Instead, they had prompted him to formulate and put into effect a five-year plan to slow down, with another five-year plan after that, to finally pack it in. He was more than afraid that what had happened to his father, Cece', might happen to him but yet, at the same time, he didn't believe that he could fall subject to such a devastating disease, as Parkinson's Disease was to his father, or any other debilitating condition, for that matter. Except for a congenitally enlarged heart, which murmured and skipped a beat occasionally, causing him slight dizzy spells periodically, which, in turn, sometimes ended with him fainting when over excitement was added to the mix, he had never been sick a day in his life.

Swiveling his chair, Raf faced the large single window that formed the entire outer wall of his office. Scanning the skyline of lower Manhattan, which spread northward, for as far as the eye could see, always had a soothing effect on him. Framed within the margins of the expansive bay window were the East River, to his right, and the Hudson River, to his left. Dissecting the island's middle was Broadway, fully decorated for the coming Fourth of July weekend celebrations. Over the bustling streets, cloth placards hung from every tiny street lamp, with banners strung between them, proclaiming the coming holiday festivities. With every color imaginable, the grand marquees and audacious billboards were already twinkling and lighting up the sky with every color imaginable, for the evening's revelry. Another smile cracked his face as he fleetingly remembered the many holidays she had hosted and the myriad of plays and musicals her theaters had offered out to him, over the past eight years, since moving his company to New York City.

Cocking his head at the full moon, he studied its light gray terrain mocking it in some bizarre manner that was private only to him, It was barely visible through the dusk clouds of the evening as it sat just above the horizon, where the burnt orange sun had been, but nevertheless its reflected light streaked the rivers' choppy, watery surfaces making each river look like a collage mobile, glass shards.