The Pornographer's Apprentice

When a videotape shows up with a note talking blackmail, ADA Dale Cuffy knows it's a matter requiring an unofficial response - especially as the video catches him at an orgy with more than his pants down. Even worse is the fatal accident (in dying color) involving his wife, who appears to have instigated the crash, in disguise.

How are these scenes related? Who played witness, on-the-spot with a camera? Can Dale thwart the blackmailer and be sure of keeping secrets? Shauna holds the key: the identity of the pornographer and the name of his apprentice.

College classmate, spurned admirer, disappointed in life and love, Milo Duarte abandons Shakespeare scholarship to capitalize on what Shakespeare knew: Sex sells. Jobless and short on options, Milo brings Jason's old videotapes to market. Profits change everything, not always for the better. When mail-order erotica tilts toward blackmail, Milo learns that insulting human decency courts an awful vengeance.

Can video recordings preserve a woman's youth and beauty? Is watching her acceptable if she doesn't know? And if she was not fully consenting, are those scenes mere entertainments or evidence of multiple felonious assaults - that is, rapes? Which is crime is worse: offering the videos for sale or erasing the evidence?

A narrative of operatic variety, The Pornographer's Apprentice dramatizes a young man's extreme and illicit gambit to satisfy his desire for one special woman - and how his friend's counterplot costs him his life. It is a story of sex and death, art and money, poetry and pornography, life's brevity and our yearning for permanence.