Sean Dennis Cashman

Luke Reader Blind Detective Sean Dennis Cashman

Imagine yourself a sophisticated, young New Yorker with a stellar career in publishing ahead of you. Then suddenly, an act of random street violence leaves your vision so distorted that your glittering career comes crashing down. That was the situation facing Luke Reader. And this is the story of how he forges a new identity and learns to turn disability to his advantage while fighting the prejudice it provokes. Plunged into the world of disabled people, he discovers an appreciation for a new kind of internal and external beauty, and finds dignity and decency even amongst the dishonest and the deluded. But then he has to fight for his and his new friends' survival against self-serving bureaucrats, and a corrupt police chief and gangsters waging an all-out drugs war. In scenes both comic and tragic, history professor and arts journalist Sean Dennis Cashman draws on his own experience of coming to terms with sight loss and his efforts to negotiate the inner workings of New England social services and an outside world turned suddenly alien, frequently hostile, and, at times terrifying.