Jim Thalman
Scott Wills returns to his childhood home with his wife and daughter. He has inherited the house from his mother, who left him in the care of relatives just before disappearing from his life. While renovating the house, Scott gets a small splinter in his foot, triggering a chain of events and fever dreams, leading him to uncover dark secrets about his hometown, why he was abandoned by his parents, and the terrible legacy that is now his birthright.
An NYPD Detective is shot by one of his own, benevolent brothers in uniform. Communities are ignited - to march for justice. Gangs put their differences aside - for a united fight, an equal opportunity. “That people not be judged by the color of their skin but for the content of their character.” The movement and unity impacts City society and leads to a Blue Wall intervention within the Police force. White cops lust for change and act on it - by flushing out racism. Not an easy fight. In the end, what was considered impossible, became possible.
Clay Kincaid hates the nickname 'Saint', he got for being too kind to stray animals and desperate people. Especially when it comes to women. With a rough and damaged past that has left him jaded, he doesn't do committed relationships. This is before he meets Samantha Jamieson, an heiress turned runaway in need of help. When she starts to work as a waitress at his bar, he discovers that she is someone truly special and amazing… someone that could warm his damaged heart.
San Francisco is preparing for the premiere of a new staging of the Puccini opera, Turandot. The passionate story of the Chinese princess Turandot, and the mysterious three riddles which are the key to her heart, are on the lips of opera buffs throughout the city. At the same time, a serial killer is haunting the gay bars of the city and is killing HIV positive long-term survivors. Stefan, a young gay East German medical student, arrives in the city for a medical congress and is following the trail of his dead father, a once high ranking AIDS researcher in the East. Stefan is investigating whether the HIV virus was an incremental result of secret human experiments that were conducted in US prisons in the seventies - a thesis of the Berlin professor Jakob Segal, which was spread by state agents of former East Germany. Secret lists involving these biological experiments are rumored to have surfaced in San Francisco.
After the death of her closest two friends, young Daphne Lessing suffers a loss of faith, then a lapse in memory. Confronted with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and a pregnancy she neither planned nor is able to explain, Daphne is forced into a terrible choice: lose her child or lose her mind. "The Substance of Things Hoped For" traces Daphne's desperate search for the past she cannot recall, the father she never had, and the child she may never know.
