The Outside of Onyx - Paperback

His life was complicated before he even understood reality, which was clouded and disturbed by the ever-present threat of systemic racism and a deep-rooted sense of denial and accountability. Vincent Artemis Butler was the product of rebellion and hypocrisies ever since his parents decided to break the conventions of society, and long held family traditions, by marrying during the tumultuous 1960's and bringing people together that would have normally had nothing to do with them. Along with his mischievous sister Victoria, Vincent deals with the hypocrisy of race while growing up in Boston, Massachusetts in ways that get him sent to faraway places and meeting three mysterious Irish nuns.

It has been quoted, "When I was a child, I did childish things. But when I became a man, I put childish things aside"! That's exactly what Vincent Artemis Butler did when he was a child and put childish things aside, like breaking sacred commandments of life and death before the age of fourteen. He travels the countryside on buses with two 'washed-up' back-up singers with the only hope of seeing James Brown perform in Springfield, Massachusetts, and finally arrive home after a life as a prodigal son.

He seeks and finally obtains financial wealth from the greed of the 1980's while working for a major bank in Downtown, Boston, which eventually led to corruption and people going to jail, with Vincent being sent to a remote island along the Merrimack River and the people he may, or may not, have encountered and their fates?

From the small coffee shops and hidden enclaves of Cambridge, Massachusetts to a remote island in the South Pacific to save his sister, he tries to reinvent himself in the seclusion of The Berkshires with his wife Teresa and their estranged daughter Tatiana, only to have tragedy and strange disappearances follow him and collect on the life he once had.