Book excerpt: Nick Santangelo, a freelance reporter investigating the explosion of a NASA satellite on Christmas Eve—later, his brother’s assassination—discovers that his ex-wife is “Eve,” an incredible revelation he fights even as he helps her and her libidinous sister defend Earth against their father’s wrath. To complicate things, his mother’s oncologist does not expect her to last the night, a package for him explodes and turns the street outside his parents’ home into an inferno, and his investigation confirms that his ex-wife is the biblical “Eve.” He treats this revelation with proper skepticism—though he has documented it, independently—and curses it as he embraces it, and damns too, until the very end, the role of prophet that Ms. Hannah Schwartz, a.k.a. Eve Black, has placed on him. This is the book that Nick has promised her he would write— to tell her story: “A Contemporary Mythic Tale,” a neo-mythic Bible story for our times. It begins quietly enough as a domestic drama about the Santangelo family—on the periphery of Bella Vista, S. Philadelphia, “The S. 9th St. Italian Market Neighborhood.” Then it quickly evolves into an SF fantasy and an epiphany that is both miraculous and tragic. The first line propels the story: “The ‘shooting star’ that Nick and his father saw Christmas Eve was not the star of Bethlehem.” An exploding NASA satellite showers the East Coast of the USA with a treacherous, electronic pulse that heals, temporarily, virtually any illness, including his mother’s “terminal” cancer. Torn between fear and doubt, suspicious that Eve, his ex-, whatever her biblical-alien status, had conspired with his brother and may have been responsible for his death, Nick leaps into the abyss and helps her and her libidinous big sister, Inga, to defend “their” planet, Heaven—and Earth—against their father Methuselah’s Almighty wrath at their ancient disobedience.