The year is 1951. The setting is Paris. The civil rights, feminist and sexual revolutions of the 60s and 70s are yet to happen. Heat of Paris is about the confluence of these forces well before they become mainstream in America. They are played out through two young people, a 26-year-old white man from rural upstate New York and a 24-year-old Negro woman from Harlem. Franz, a young soldier fresh from the battlefield of World War II, travels to Paris as a stringer for a new start-up magazine. There he meets Christie, a master’s student researching the French writer Georg Sand. This chance meeting leads to a uniquely American post-war love story full of adventure, tenderness, and hope for a better future. Their struggle foreshadows the struggle of America which is yet to come.

Peter Breyer was born to immigrant parents who fled war-torn Europe in 1942. He came to writing late in life after recording the life of his parents—Holocaust escapees—who left a daughter in Germany when they fled to America. Peter attended the City College of New York and completed a tour in the Peace Corps in the south of India where he met Mildred, his wife of fifty-six years. He received his PhD in City and Regional Planning from Rutgers University and has worked as a strategic planning consultant for the Urban Health Institute while pursuing his passion for building and writing. Peter is currently a hemp farmer in the Hudson Valley and has authored four books, has had over a dozen short stories and essays published, and won numerous book prizes. Peter and his wife Mildred also reside part-time in New Jersey where they spend time with family and worship at the First Baptist church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset.