When smart and beautiful Athena Van Fleet attends her sister s wedding she encounters John Pickett the officiating priest whom she knew as a student in college Now married to tennis star Ted Talbot who is retired with an injured knee she moves to Newport when her husband is named President of the Tennis Hall of Fame Smitten by Pickett Athena uses her sway as the daughter of a bishop to secure the young priest an improbable call as rector of the wealthy Newport parish As Ted begins to sense Athena s enchantment he jealously makes Pickett his prey Then unaccountably the penniless priest becomes proprietor of Rosecliff mansion igniting rumors up and down the Eastern Seaboard that the priest is a tycoon or a drug lord Narrator Brooke Adams feeling like a bystander implicated at the scene of the crime watches as Pickett s incredible scheme is unraveled to an unintended end From the sad abandoned mill towns of industrial New England to the hunt fields and ballrooms of Newport from an aged acolyte in rural Massachusetts to pretentious Park Avenue bishops and from the shining spectacle of the Champs lys es to the elusive Bishop s House in Providence Pickett s Dream is borne from the Yuppie Go Go 80 s to the mean streets of our time and the innocence of a heretical dreamer to the world we find ourselves in Pickett s DreamLike the street priest in his inaugural novel For Theirs is the Kingdom Carlisle descends from a Royal Navy admiral and the Anglican bishop of Montreal The story revolves around a dramatic project under his grandfather s cathedral A plan to construct an underground shopping mall metro stop and office tower provides the historical artifact for the fictionalized account Melding fiction and fact Carlisle pursues the hypocritical greed of the church and through the lens of his privilege paradoxically discovers that the truth always lies on the margins Carlisle s second novel Pickett s Dream was first written thirty years ago and thanks to the vicissitudes of publishing was accepted and never published The story recalls the Go Go 1980s and the heyday of Yuppie culture as the forgotten seed that was destined to produce the mayhem we now find ourselves in Impossible romance ill fated dreams memory and hope conspire to tell the story of our time if not to foretell our future A self confessed contradiction Carlisle portrays the conundrum of his generation how to navigate the lures of the world toward a lasting transcendent vision As an unabashed lover of beautiful things and most of all beautiful cars he s spent the last ten years working with the homeless amid the poverty of the street So his protagonist John Pickett replies to the narrator s offer to avert his bankruptcy Thank you Brooke But it isn t the money It was never the money Carlisle also authored The Complete Idiot s Guide to Understanding Intelligent Design which grew out of his God and Science Project noted in The New York Times Asked to write a fair handed treatment of the religious controversy he was caught in the crossfire between conservative Christians and liberal evolutionists In the end he concluded both sides had missed the point deferring to the wisdom of Einstein Science without religion is lame religion without science is blind Carlisle earned his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and graduate theological degrees from Harvard and Yale and is a regular commentator on New England Public Radio He lives in western Massachusetts spending as much time as he can in Montreal and the South of France He is married with four children.