Walker Hall — a trading floor, a vineyard, and a debt twenty years collectible.

Walker Hall: A Memoir of Inheritance and Defiance is the debut novel-memoir of James J. Lukezic, twelve years in the writing.

It opens with a detour: a recruiting promise broken, an Ivy League acceptance evaporating with the coach who made it, and a young man fifteen miles from the US border on the Canadian side of Niagara deciding what he intends to do about it.

What follows runs from Cornell to Merritt, from Manhattan to Cuba, from the first vintage on the Niagara Lakeshore across from the Toronto skyline — the most coveted land in the Niagara Peninsula — to the morning a bank changed the locks on his father's hillside, and then through regulators, subpoenas, three judges and a jury.

Loosely inspired by the author's own life and presented as fiction, Walker Hall is finally a book about inheritance: what a man is handed, what is taken from him, and what he is willing to spend two decades getting back.