Duquesne University President, Ken Gormley, lawyer and best-selling author, will read from and discuss his debut novel, The Heiress of Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh takes center stage in this twisty legal drama
Duquesne president Ken Gormley's love for the steel city shines in this novel of family, law, and rebuilding a future.
Thirty years in the making, The Heiress of Pittsburgh is a love story about people, places, and simple virtues that flourished in the working class towns that once built America. This beautifully-crafted novel provides hope that precious qualities of the past can be recast to create a rich new future; but only if success is boldly redefined.
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Attorney Shawn Rossi could have earned a fortune.
He could have worked at big firms in booming cities and sunnier climes.
Instead, he returned to Pittsburgh, the struggling steel town of his youth -- to help regular people.
And now he’s doubting his life decisions.
His wife has just died and his teenage daughters are getting piercings and staying out all night. His professional life is equally in shambles: He’s handling an unwinnable estate contest and representing the one person he vowed never to get near again: his ex-college flame, Marjorie.
Even for Rossi, this case appears hopeless.
A coffin shows up with the wrong corpse.
Nuns from a secretive home for unwed mothers can’t break their vows of silence to testify.
The family is about to lose everything.
KEN GORMLEY is president of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. A lawyer, constitutional scholar, and author, Gormley's work has earned him national and international acclaim. His book The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr (Crown 2010) was a New York Times bestseller and was selected as one of the top non-fiction books of the year by the New York Times and Washington Post. Gormley's first book, Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation (Addison-Wesley 1997), won multiple book awards. The Heiress of Pittsburgh is Gormley's first work of fiction. The former mayor of his town in Forest Hills, Pennsylvania - a small community outside Pittsburgh - he lives there with his wife and family.