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A richly plotted legal chessboard of a thriller that pits the litigator Michael Seeley against Cuba’s security police, the U.S. State Department, his firm’s own partners, and a closetful of skeletons
Fueled by alcohol, legal brilliance, and heedless risk-taking, Michael Seeley once oversaw his law firm’s most successful litigation practice. Until it all fell apart. Booze, hubris, and overreach cost him his wife, his job, and likely the life of his last client, a Chinese dissident journalist. After two years sober and practicing small-town law in upstate New York, Seeley has earned back most of what he lost: the partnership in his old Manhattan law firm, if not his corner office; the wary respect of most of his colleagues; the lucrative clients — but not the gin-sharpened passions. Then the aging and renowned Cuban musician Hector Reynoso enters his office with a simple request: help him and six other composers who defined Cuba’s musical golden age of the 1940s and 1950s — the music that made the Buena Vista Social Club internationally famous — reclaim copyright to their work. When Reynoso goes missing only to turn up dead, Seeley’s reluctant promise to help draws him deeper and deeper into the violent underbelly of Havana and a decades-long conspiracy that runs from the partners in his firm to the U.S. State Department to Cuba’s security police, which is willing to do anything to suppress the truth. And in the heat of Havana, Seeley will lose himself to his worst and best passions as his pursuit of justice narrows down to a desperate gambit to save the stunningly seductive Amaryll, who is playing her own dangerous game, even at the risk of his own life.

Paul Goldstein is a writer, lawyer and teacher. He is the author of three novels on intellectual property themes as well as two leading treatises on copyright law – the four-volume Goldstein on Copyright (Aspen Publishers Third Edition 2005) and the one-volumeInternational Copyright: Principles, Law and Practice (Oxford University Press Second Edition with P. Bernt Hugenholtz 2010) – as well as four widely-adopted law school textbooks.

Mr. Goldstein is a member of the Bars of New York and California and has since 1988 been Of Counsel to the law firm of Morrison & Foerster LLP, where he advises clients on major intellectual property lawsuits and transactions.

Since 1985 Mr. Goldstein has been the Lillick Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, has testified before congressional committees on intellectual property legislation, been an invited expert at international governmental meetings on copyright issues, and is a member of the editorial boards of leading intellectual property publications in England, Germany and Switzerland.

Born in Mt. Vernon, Paul Goldstein graduated from Brandeis University in 1964 and from Columbia Law School in 1967, and started his law teaching career at the State University of New York at Buffalo that year.  In April 1997 Newsweek magazine named Mr. Goldstein to its “list of 100 people for the new century,” as one “whose creativity or talent or brains or leadership will make a difference in the years ahead.”