BY YOUR DEEDS follows the journey of Violette Sier, one of the few female attorneys in New York in 1923 that will take her from Manhattan to Paris to Berlin to Mongolia to save the life of her client, a war hero, named Harlan Gamble. Her coming of age is the coming of age of America.
Violette, passionately and bravely, faces the bitter social backlash being one of the first in her profession. Her specialty is representing women, indigents and those unlawfully detained at the asylums on Wards Island.
To that end, Violette is retained by a mysterious women from Berlin, known only as Missus Jackobee, to represent an American war hero, Harlan Gamble, who is being detained and heavily drugged at the Men’s Asylum for the criminally insane.
At the same time, in the Bronx, at the grand opening of Yankee Stadium, four members of the Justice Department have a man they call “The Jew” under surveillance. Their hope is that he will lead them to the missing war hero, Harlan Gamble. This surveillance will end with a shootout on the elevated subway and the train crashing onto the Grand Concourse.
Harlan Gamble was a decorated officer during the Great War, a victim of a poison gas attack he was left temporarily blind in a hospital ward for months. During that time he paid to have books read to him. And it was in that ward he came upon the idea of a private adventure he would undertake when he regained his sight. It was his dream to travel to Mongolia to search for the lost grave of Genghis Khan.
Little did he know that this one choice, which was a means of getting away from a world of political madness and cultural violence, would put him in the gunsights of two nations, and turn him into one of the most wanted men in the world.
So begins the love story of Violette Sier and Harlan Gamble as she travels from New York, across Europe, and onto Mongolia, fighting to not only to save her client’s life, but as the dangers rise, to save her own.