Jeff Russell is the author of the debut novel, The Rules of Love and Law, published through Abbott Press, a story based upon Jeff’s passion for justice through his research on the landmark Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright, which gave the right of legal representation to all those prosecuted in the United States, as well as close study of the racial tensions between white and black Americans, Anglos and Germans in his hometown of Baltimore during WWII.
I worked with Jeff on both The Rules of Love and Law and his first novel, Standing On the Horizon.
The Rules of Love and Law: It is 1938, and Juliana Corbeau is wealthy, privileged, and devout. Will Stahl is poor, hard-working, and—as a first-generation German-American—incisively intelligent in his pursuit of legal democratic justice.
They’re brought together by a chance accident that leads to the legal misrepresentation and eventual death in prison of a poor black man falsely accused of assaulting Juliana. . .even as developments in Germany during the rise of the Nazis endanger Will’s closest relatives.
The love that unfolds between Juliana and Will eventually brings them both a greater understanding of their world and era, as together they alternately fight to identify, succumb beneath, and finally honestly face their own external and internal demons.
In the end, Will must make a life-or-death decision, while Juliana must emerge from her shell of social privilege to face the complexities of modern American society, a society in which she too comes to prize most highly the American ideal: ‘liberty and justice for all.’
Jeff Russell says:
“Victoria, you should win an ‘Editor-of-the-Year’ award. You’ll never know what a difference you made.”