Do you believe that the name you are given at birth has a lot to do with how you live your life? If you do, what would a child named Don Juan Casanova grow up to be like? How would being blessed (or cursed) with such a name affect his life? Look at what these names mean. Don Juan – a man who has sexual relationships with many women. Casanova – a lover, especially a man who is a promiscuous and unscrupulous lover.
Don Juan was raised by his grandparents, and they taught him to be a Lothario, a man whose chief interest is seducing women. Then he had to go to Vietnam and fight. When he returned, memories of what he had gone through during the war made it easy for him to turn back to seducing women. Booze helped him escape even more from these horrible memories.
During the day, he is an English teacher. Each night, he is the maître d’ at his family’s nightclub, The Aphrodisiac Academe.
Now he is close to forty years old. After having seduced hundreds of women, Don Juan has one desire: he wants to change his ways. He wants to get serious with one woman and be faithful to her. But how easy is it for a Lothario to change the way he lives?
Now throw some pretty grisly murders into the mix. His grandfather and his younger brother, also Lotharios, have been brutally murdered. Guess who the police suspect of killing them? Then there are the bodies of the dead that Don Juan discovers and hides. Don Juan thinks the killer might come after him next.
So Don Juan is dodging a killer while finding the killer’s victims and hiding them. He is doing all he can to stay out of the clutches of the police who think he is the killer. And while all this is going on, he is trying to find the perfect woman to remain faithful to and spend the rest of his life with. Family secrets, drug deals, and undercover agents only serve to complicate things even more and make the already difficult task of redeeming his life even harder.
If the name of this book gives you the idea that book is erotica, you are deceived. There are sex scenes, yes, but they are not X-rated. This is the story of a man who grew up to lead the life of a Lothario and is now trying to find a way out of that lifestyle while trying to prove that he is innocent of murder.
And considering who the murderer is and the method of murder, maybe the life of a Lothario isn’t one to be desired.
I was sent a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. If you would like to purchase a copy of The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova for yourself, please click on the Amazon link below.
Amazon Link: The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova
Recommended Articles:
Lloyd Lofthouse Interview – Teaching, Working in a Nightclub, and Life Experiences
Running with the Enemy – a Review
Lloyd Lofthouse Interview – Writing, Characters,and Vietnam
Crazy is Normal – a Review
How Public Schools in the US Have Improved – Guest Post by Lloyd Lofthouse
Favorite Sentences:
He was sitting on top of the counter with his long legs sprawled across all three sinks, staring at the mirror in deep concentration, as is he was willing the Wicked Witch of the North to appear from the mirror and weave a spell to make him handsome instead of butt-ugly.
When he spoke, his voice was soft, like a feather duster gently moving across a hardwood floor.
His complexion was so pale that his zits looked like glowing embers on a sheet of white paper.
What if his brother had turned the body into hamburger and planned to serve it to the customers to get rid of the evidence?
New Word Learned:
variegated – having patches, stripes, or marks of different colors
About the Author:
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran who worked as a maître d’ in a 15 million dollar nightclub for a few years. He also taught English literature in the public schools for most of 30 years.
In 1999, his wife, Anchee Min, the author of the memoir Red Azalea, a book that was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1994, introduced Lloyd to Robert Hart, the real-life character of My Splendid Concubine.
He and Anchee live in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.
Website: http://lloydlofthouse.org/
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