New York City
A trading floor at full volume, and a kid learning the price of a seat.
Twelve years in the writing
Walker
Hall
A Memoir of Inheritance and Defiance
A debut novel in the form of a memoir — Wall Street at full volume, a Niagara hillside lost to a bank, and one man's twenty-year refusal to let the matter rest.
"Some fights end not with a feeling but simply with the land finally, legally, being yours again."
Chapter Thirty-Four
The Book
A trading floor, a vineyard, and a debt twenty years collectible.
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.
- 34
- Chapters
- 210
- Pages
- 12
- Years in the writing
Inside
Selected chapters
Foreclosure
The bank changes the locks on a hillside his father built by hand.
The First Vintage
Rock, root and weather — the slow arithmetic of making something real.
Honey Trap
High society, and the quiet ways men are separated from their leverage.
SIRA & Sentinel Mutual
Regulators, insurers, and a war fought entirely on paper.
Jury Trial
Twenty years, twelve strangers, and an answer at last.
An Excerpt
"I made sure the hearse stopped once more at the vineyard on the way, at his favorite lookout point on the lake where he used to stand some evenings with a glass of his own wine and say nothing at all for twenty minutes at a stretch. I held a hand on the casket and whispered what I needed to say before we let him go, my eyes running the entire time even as I tried to hold myself together for everyone watching from their cars."
The Author
James J. Lukezic
A graduate of Cornell University, James began his career at Merrill Lynch & Co. through its Junior Executive Training Program, later serving corporate, government and high-net-worth clients in New York, Miami, Buenos Aires and Santiago. He spent two years as a Visiting Lecturer in Princeton University's Department of Politics and completed Executive Education in Marketing at Harvard Business School.
He has held roles at Citigroup Global Markets, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, and served as Director of Investments at Oppenheimer & Co. Today he is Managing Principal of Old Slip Capital Partners, a leader in fiduciary governance, where he leads the firm's high-net-worth wealth management division.
He is Chairman of ITF USA, a 501(c)(3) assisting landmine victims in more than thirty countries, and of the Lukezic Family Foundation, supporting single-parent families across New York City's five boroughs. He lives with his family between New York and Dallas.
For my father, Anthony — who crossed a border on foot with nothing but a trade in his hands, and planted a hillside so his son would always have solid ground to stand on.
Publication
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First Edition · 2026
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