On Tuesday, July 1, Pleiadi – a married father of four now living in North Carolina – will officially publish his first book, a crime thriller born from the wreckage of his own life—addiction, generational silence, and the brutal beauty of survival.
“This whole thing is for the people who didn’t make it…friends I lost to addiction, grief that never got spoken, families like mine that cracked down the middle and kept going anyway,” Pleiadi said. In Powder Blue follows Vincent LoCicero, a man who loses his mother in the South Tower on 9/11 and his father to alcoholism not long after. By sixteen, he’s dealing heroin on Long Island. By twenty, he’s committing robbery—and finds himself in possession of a USB drive that powerful men will kill to get back.
Pleiadi describes it as tackling legacy, grief, and escape.
“Pain can shape you, but it does not have to define you,” he said. “People might not have a linear path and that’s alright because in the end it’s never too late to do the right thing.”
The novel, he says, is for people who miss stories like The Sopranos and Goodfellas. “I kind of wrote what I wanted to hear,” he said. “What I would want to read.”
“It’s not just about crime,” he continued. “It’s about the boys left behind by fathers, systems, and silence.” That silence is personal.
“The reason I wrote about silence is I watched my mom stay silent to what my uncle was doing to me. My father stayed silent. There was silence in my family that broke it apart,” Pleiadi said. “So silence across generations.”
Pleiadi knows how deadly the quiet can be. Though he now lives in Charlotte, he calls the book a “love letter with bruises” to Levittown, recalling his own struggle with addiction and how he lost friends to drugs.
“People overdosed, kids that you would never expect,” he said. “And probably what played into that, a big part of it, was silence and the stigma around talking about opioid addiction.”
Rather than romanticize suburban life, he peels back the curtain. “I wanted to pay tribute to the version of Levittown that doesn’t make it into brochures,” he said. “It’s not always pretty, but it’s real..and it shaped me.”
The Kindle edition of In Powder Blue comes with a hyperlinked playlist—Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Eminem, the Stones—woven throughout the novel with deliberate intention.
“I wrote this book like a mad scientist in a basement,” Pleiadi quipped. “Syncing scenes to songs the way people said you could sync The Dark Side of the Moon to The Wizard of Oz. The symbolism, the Easter eggs, the callbacks—it’s all layered.”
Pleiadi, whose day job is a project manager building homes, spent five years writing In Powder Blue, mostly at night after his children had gone to sleep. The book’s dedication reads like a gut punch. In part, it says: “This is for the ones who never got to grow up. For those still sick and suffering, and for every person who lost someone to a needle, a lie, or a silence too heavy to carry.”
Pleiadi’s hopes for his novel’s lasting impact are raw and unfiltered: “If one person reads it and thinks ‘holy [expletive], I thought it was just me,’ then maybe I did what I was supposed to do,” he said.