Plum & Jaggers Book

A funny, compassionate testament to the power of the imagination to recover, reconstruct, and overcome.

Sam McWilliams was the only member of the comedy troupe "Plum & Jaggers" who remembered the afternoon of June 11, when the first two cars of the Rapido from Milan to Rome exploded, killing everyone on board except a four-year-old French boy and a conductor.

Haunted by the terrorist explosion that killed his parents and obsessively driven to protect his orphaned younger siblings -- even if it means breaking the law -- precocious, fiercely independent Sam discovers during a stint in a Washington, D.C., juvenile home that he has a gift as a writer of family comedy. So begins the dark, quirky Plum & Jaggers series of sketches about a family of children whose parents are never at home. The McWilliams family troupe rises from open-mike venues to small comedy clubs to a late-night television slot, creating a stir -- and unwittingly exposing the family to new dangers that cost Sam his resilient wit and threaten his sanity.

Plum & Jaggers is the story of a family blown apart by tragedy and one person's powerful refusal to accept their fate.