tim norbeck

Andrew James, a 61-year old widower and internist, travels from his home in Florida to Raleigh, North Carolina, to give a speech to the state medical society. The trip is uneventful — until a passenger across the aisle abruptly stands up and exposes what James believes is a bomb device. The physician’s decisive action leads him to become both a national hero and, initially unbeknownst to him, a target of the FBI. That incident — those two minutes — profoundly changes a life and leads to an unexpected reconnection.

Told from the perspective of an upright citizen with a 1950s American middle-class upbringing, this is the account of the physician’s life through the months following his heroic, misunderstood, possibly criminal act.

His story touches themes of friendship and loss, opens a small window on our post 9/11 justice system, brings in wide-ranging American history and trivia, offers a bit of a Valentine to post-war Buffalo, New York, and is, in the end, a love story.