Fractured Persona

Richard Fornek wakes up in a hospital after a car accident a completely different person.  Literally.  His mind is still his own, but he is in the body of Daniel Curtis, who was hospitalized after his wife attacked him.  Richard is in a different city (actually an entirely different state), has a different wife, different friends, a different family, and a different body and life.  He realizes that he must learn to live this new life, but runs into several problems along the way.

Daniel Curtis is suspected of murdering a woman with whom he was having an affair.  Only, Daniel is Richard, so he must piece together who Daniel really was, and where he was at the time of the murder.  What he learns is that Daniel’s life was coming apart at the seams, and he must figure out how to put it all back together so he can live his life- as a free man.  It is not an easy task, as Richard really has no idea who can be trusted, or if Daniel may have actually been the murderer.  Richard must also find out what happened to his body, and if this madness can all be righted.

There are a few times while reading that the pace lagged with just a little bit too much detail that was not relevant in the end, but the story being told outweighed those times.  While the ending may leave the reader staring at the book, hoping it may change, it quickly becomes apparent that it could end no other way.  There is no way everyone gets a happy ending, so those that can should take it.

Fractured Persona is a story of losing sight of who you are, learning through someone else’s eyes, and putting a life back together from the pieces that you find.  There are times when life seems as though it is living itself, and Krebs cleverly cloaks the idea of feeling like you are not yourself in a metaphor of switching bodies.  It is also a story of understanding that you never really know anyone else until you have lived in their shoes- an opportunity that is nearly impossible.

Krebs delivers a story that is part mystery, part fantasy, and entirely introspection.  Although the idea of switching bodies has been done before, there is something that is just enough different that will draw one in until the end.  He is able to delve into a world of despair, loss, and confusion, and bring the reader out on the other side with a feeling of hope, gain, and discovery.  Fractured Persona offers a different look into the lives of others, and will keep the reader turning the pages wanting more.

I really really wanted to like this book, and I was totally enthralled by the first half of it. I love a good mystery where the lead character is not a police investigator or FBI detective. Here, we have Elle Bramasol who is a true crime writer who is elicited by a big Hollywood director named Eliot Kingman to write his story after he ends up in prison for the murder of one of his researchers. Elle is given access to a centuries old document in Kingman’s possession which turns out to be the diary of a vampire named Verland. And it is Verland’s story that Kingman really wants Bramasol to tell.

Despite the “not so new” elements of this story, like I said, I was totally intrigued. It’s hard enough to try to reinvent a vampire story these days. Much of the book is the diary entries themselves, so while you are given a detailed perspective of Verland’s life, it had a real close feel to Seth Grahame-Smith’s “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” to me. Unfortunately, the diary is what killed it for me, no pun intended. I found myself caring less about Verland’s war time efforts in Germany and wanting to get back to Elle and Kingman and their real purpose.

For me, the book also brought back elements of a classic fav of mine – Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs where we have a somewhat fragile heroine playing quid pro quo with a pompous genius behind bars in order to learn about a dangerous killer on the loose. Unfortunately, by the time we actually meet Verland he just isn’t as dynamic as any reader will expect and hope him to be.

While Kingman is the human bringing up references to immortality because he longs to be a vampire, he is stagnant as a character being behind bars. The book is thrown off balance when the attention is given to Kingman’s research assistants instead who also have an odd obsession with death. By the end, Bramasol gets her story handed to her without really having to work for it, and in turn the reader is spoon fed a drama built around a vampire diary which turns out to be more developed than the story itself.

An advance reader copy of the book was sent to me in electronic form by the author for review.

The moral of this story is that one should not mess with friends of guys who used to do “black ops”.

What happens to special agents after they “retire” from doing “black ops” for a living? Cordell Logan runs a flight school with marginal success. What happens when his ex-wife shows up in his dilapidated office and asks for help finding her husband’s killer? Is it further complicated by the fact that the recently departed is a former comrade in arms who stole her from him? Of course it does.

This is a well structured, easy to read, classic detective story. I give it four and a half stars for the plot. I would have given it five if some of the plot developments had been a little less predictable.

The protagonist’s character is extremely well thought out and expertly drawn. I wish more of the characters had as much depth. The ex-wife is well portrayed and exhibits a nice level of conflict. The ex-father in law is nicely drawn as well. Beyond these three characters, most of the rest are flat. With a plot that moves as quickly as this one does, some character development does get left behind. That is unfortunate. With the author’s keen sense of observation as demonstrated by his portrayal of his protagonist and the ex-wife, I feel he could have given the reader a deeper understanding of the secondary characters. Even so, I give the story five stars for the characters.

Technical execution was flawless and therefore gets five stars. I do have one quibble. I like acknowledgments as much as the next person, but unlike most of my colleagues, I think they should go at the end of the work where the reader has a better understanding of what went into the creation of the book. IMHO, the book should start at the beginning of the story. Commentary can come later.

The following passage is typical of the book’s pace and gives a nice example of the book’s overall “attitude” towards its characters and it subjects.

Several of Echevarria’s neighbors told police they’d heard him yell, heard what sounded like firecrackers, and glimpsed the killer through their windows. They described him as five-foot-five and 180 pounds. Or five-foot-ten and 160 pounds. Or well over six feet, on the thin side, with a long loping stride—kind of like Gomer Pyle, who used to be on TV back when TV was worth watching. One witness said the shooter was a Latino in his late twenties. Another said he was Arabic in his thirties. Two witnesses said the killer was a Caucasian with a West Hollywood tan. Still others described him as “Jewish-looking” or “the Italian-type” or even Indian—the tomahawk-chop-Geronimo kind, not the kind that worship cows and wrap goddamn bed sheets around their heads. Whoever murdered Echevarria was swarthy and clean-shaven. The witnesses all agreed on that. They also agreed on the getaway car: nobody saw one.

I did neglect one important facet of Mr. Freed’s writing. He is genuinely funny in places. It’s not the mean ugly kind of funny we see so often, but a lighthearted understanding of life’s absurdities. When you read this book make sure that you are in a place that when you laugh out loud no one will care.

OBTW… for those of you who do not understand aircraft, the title is itself a joke After you have read the book, look up what happens to pilots who find themselves in a flat spin. It’s not pretty.

Reviewed by Author C.V. Hunt

4 out of 5

ABOUT:

A young libertarian flu fighter huddles at home in New York’s East Village, blogging about a devastating avian flu pandemic as he sells masks, gloves, and goggles over the Internet. An intriguing, vexing woman stalks him while he delves into the mysteries of influenza and serves up colorful commentary on the chaos swirling around—and within—his world. When ‘Count Blogula’ gets involved with some lively community flu activists, he collides with a government bent on controlling Americans as if they were viral intruders. With the U.S. staggering through a kind of national Katrina—Chinatown a smoky ruin, Atlanta evacuated, Houston blown up—he must fight both the system and the contagion to save his life and love.

REVIEW:

When the world is struck with a raging virus, one man takes his opinions, research, and eye-witness accounts to the internet. A personality known only as ‘Count Blogula’ ships personal protective equipment to people looking for salvation from a deadly flu virus. He begins his blog by offering advice, brief history lessons, and a variety of links that take you to the information that he talks about. But eventually, the world falls apart before his eyes as the virus breaks down his friends, the city that he lives in, the government, and eventually him.

FROM THE BOOK:

We need to infect society with rational fear. We need to go viral – no less than H5N1 has done. People far from New York must prepare.  It’s not too late! Yet.

American Fever doesn’t read like a book, but exactly like the story intends: a blog. It’s filled with the random musings of a man as a deadly virus begins to wiggle its way in to his life, and the narration grows more personal every day. It’s a dairy of the madness that the world would become if we were consumed with an epidemic.

I enjoyed this book, but I’m not sure how I would perceive it in paperback. Normally I can rate how much I like a story by how quickly I read it – this was an exception. I read American Fever on my Kindle Fire, and found myself constantly sidetracked by the hyperlinks that were posted within. The narrator offered informational links to videos and websites that made the story extremely interactive.

Toward the end of the story, I found myself reading it on the actual blog. That’s right, the author actually has a blog that contains all of the posts, and you can read the whole story as originally intended online. I enjoyed see the photos that were posted in the blog that didn’t transition over to the download. I’m curious if they made it to the printed version.

You could easily get lost in this, or the hyperlinks, whichever fascinates you more. Overall, I was impressed with the amount of research that Peter Christian Hall invested into creating this… book?

Reviewed by Author Nick Vasey

With ‘The Dionysian Alliance’ Jack Rinella has blended sex, magic, mystery, myth and death in a manner which is as educational as it is entertaining. As a committed proponent of the benefits of entheogenic spiritual enlightenment (and steadfast opponent of religious dogmatism), I must say I found many aspects of this novel especially interesting … I guess it would be fair to say Mr. Rinella was preaching to the converted with me. If you are a conservative, or have ‘plain-vanilla’ tastes, consider yourself warned now … this is not a novel for the faint-hearted. There is no quarter given to dogmatists or bigots, whether they be of the moral, sexual, or religious variety. And thank God for that!

Those readers familiar with the phenomenally well-written and deservedly popular television series ‘True Blood’ – will find similarly clever exposés of everyday religious hypocrisy, bigotry, and hatred being laid bare by Mr. Rinella in this novel.

The reader is convincingly drawn into a previously unknown world in which cult-members consider the ancient tenets of a Paganistic lifestyle the cornerstone of their religious group ‘The Dionysian Alliance,’ a group which learned scholars falsely believe has been extinct for millennia. It transpires that in the face of relentless governmental and religious persecution throughout the ages, they have (both wisely and successfully) kept their faith secret for a couple of thousand years.

What is marvelous is that the intensity, maturity, integrity and validity of the relationships which form between members of this mystical circle seem to quite effortlessly make the traditionally dogmatic and proscriptive religions seem at best antiquated, and at worst, primitive, fundamentalist and/or dangerous. The sexual self-awareness, freedom and guiltlessness of Dionysian cult-members is a distinguishing feature. Sex as self/deity worship is a central theme, and the Dionysians seem to have an acute appreciation of the benefits of balancing the intellectual, the esoteric, and the sexual in a very alluring way. In short these are competent, thoughtful and interesting people, any of whom it would be a pleasure to have at your next dinner party. Consequently, it becomes very easy to believe (or at least consider the possibility) that their detractors and attackers, the folks rigidly following traditionalist monotheistic religions are, shall we say, somewhat less evolved?

If the novel has faults, it would be that it is on occasion more informative than engaging; additionally, the protagonist sometimes seems to be a little more detached from or unaffected by these many extraordinary events than he probably should or would be.  There is also a formatting slippage here and a typo or two there, but ultimately these are very small quibbles for a book which is fundamentally an intelligently thought out and well-executed idea … an idea which forces the reader to reconsider numerous supposed societal and cultural ‘absolutes.’ Given so many people in the modern world are more comfortable not questioning, that stands as a good outcome all by itself.

‘The Dionysian Alliance’ is an ‘alternative’ read which challenges traditionalist dogma and staid preconceptions head-on. Because it does this well, the result is refreshing, interesting and uplifting. It is a worthy read for all intelligent adults, regardless of the current colour of your convictions. Hats off to you Mr. Rinella for a job well done … I give your novel four stars out of five.

ABOUT:

When the police do nothing to solve the murders of three prostitutes knifed to death in 1866 Sicily, a struggling widow unmasks the killer, but not before uncovering burdensome truths of her own.

It is six years after Unification and Sicily is in chaos. Bandits rule the hills. Waves of cholera kill thousands. The mafia begins its reign of organized terror, raping a population squeezed by conscription, crippling taxes, and corrupt officials.

At a high-class house near Palermo, three prostitutes have been knifed to death, their foreheads slashed with a strange mark, their bodies dumped on the madam’s doorstep. When the chief inspector does little to solve the case, the madam summons her lifelong friend and asks her to catch the killer.

A forty-something midwife with seven children and diminishing funds, Serafina decides she must help her friend. She plunges into the investigation, gathering evidence, following leads. She meets with relatives and friends of the deceased and discovers a thread common to all three victims.

But when a fourth victim is strangled, Serafina’s hopes for a quick resolution are dashed. Her emotional low is short-lived, however. In a defiant meeting with the don, she makes an important discovery. Convinced of the murderer’s identity, she conceives a daring plan and, with the help of her daughter, unmasks the killer.

REVIEW:

Picture it. Sicily. 1866. Bandits. Cholera. Mafia. Corruption. Dead Prostitutes.

No, this isn’t a story being told by Sophia Petrillo. It’s the setting and basis for Susan Anderson’s first book, Death of a Serpent.

When three high-class prostitutes are found murdered with a strange serpent shaped mark cut into their foreheads, Madam Rosia seeks the help of her long time friend Serafina to help solve the case. Mainly because local officials aren’t interested.

And though Serafina is widowed with seven kids and busy being a midwife, she decides to help her friend after discovering that one of her eldest runaway daughters had sought refuge with Rosia.

The book is driven mainly by fast paced dialogue as Serafina interviews the other girls and local townsfolk about the murders, ultimately leading her closer and closer to solving the murders.

Anderson sets the mood of 1800 Sicilian language with short sentences with reversed-like sentence structure.  (“Reading a book I am.”) Though a bit choppy in the beginning, I eventually got the hang of it and had no trouble catching on.  I even found myself reading the book in the style of Don Corleone at times!

I would have liked a bit more depth into the characters as far as Serafina and Rosia go. Outside of dialogue, we don’t really learn that much about either of them. A good mystery for me has the reader caring just as much about the protagonist as in finding out who committed the crime.

Besides the lack in characterization, those who enjoy a good historical mystery will be pleased.

3 out of 5

Reviewed by Author C. V. Hunt

ABOUT:

Rebekah had vowed to stop killing for love, but she finds herself unable to stop. Scott still knows nothing about her secret life. She is happily attending graduate school when the unthinkable happens–she is arrested and charged for one of the murders she committed last year. She spends a few nights in jail before she goes in front of a judge, who sets the bail at an exorbitant $1 million. Her father and Scott are able to raise the necessary money and get her out on bail. She kills again, even when she is out on bail. Rebekah has hired an excellent criminal defense attorney, but she’s afraid it won’t be enough and she’ll go back to jail.

REVIEW:

In Judgment Of Evil, Rebekah is put on trial for a murder that she committed in the first book, Instrument Of Evil. Although Rebekah doesn’t seem to be too affected by this (I expected from her apathetic personality), her husband isn’t concerned by the fact that his bride is on trial for a murder. He seems just as apathetic as her, and unconcerned with the fact that she was in a hot tub with another man while they were deep into their relationship. Her husband, Scott, seems to brush it off as if it were nothing.

After a whirlwind relationship, the newly wedded couple has to break the news to their families that they have eloped. Their time between meting family and the trail was filled with tedious areas about shopping, and opening gifts. The passages were a constant whirlwind of designer clothes and furniture, which seemed to string into unnecessary detail.

Even though she vows to cut back on killing, she still does it from time to time, but the intermissions between them are filled with everyday living descriptions, without any real cause other than to write another sex scene between Rebekah and her husband. The potential of writing first person would give you an extraordinary amount of room for internal conflict of fighting the inner demon, which I think the writer fell flat on. It just seemed like there should have been a bigger internal debate, instead we got pages of a normal happy life with a little sentence drop every now and then of: “I should stop killing.” And then back to Prada, IKEA, Burberry, and Fifth Avenue.

At first glance I want to compare it roughly to American Psycho, but Patrick Bateman showed us an opinion of consumerism, materialism, and everything that is wrong with society. Rebekah’s personality just doesn’t seem to flesh out at all, leaving you to wonder if her story would be plausible, and just like the first book, I was left arguing with myself whether or not I liked the story. The character does fall loosely into the traits of a psychopath, leaving it debatable to the reader as to whether or not they find the story intriguing, and again I will have to fall into the middle.

3 out of 5

Reviewed by Author C.V. Hunt

ABOUT:

Rebekah Johnson has a really big secret, one she’s pretty sure will end her new relationship with Scott. She’d like to tell him, but she anticipates his response would be to break up with her. Or report her to the police. Most likely both. Rebekah is a fledgling serial killer, and she’s not ready to put killing aside. What’s a young serial killer to do? Can she give up killing to save her relationship?

REVIEW:

I have to admit that I messed up. I actually read the second book in this story first, but that’s another review.

Instrument of Evil is about a female serial killer as she grows up, and the events that led her to kill. During college, she has to write a thesis for phycology, and decides to write two separate ones. One thesis is about children, and their habits of lying, and the other about psychopaths, which Rebekah has self-diagnosed herself as.

FROM THE BOOK:

I was forced to accept the idea that I was a psychopathic person, a person who would lie, cheat, steal, and hurt others, for the fun of it.

The first third of the book was spent solely on backstory, which seemed to serve no real purpose other than to prove that she was brought up in a somewhat normal household. Rebekah’s character rubbed off on me as a spoiled, intelligent, brat, who only did things for attention. There were long descriptions of family vacations and shopping trips, but they didn’t really show us anything other than descriptions.

There was nothing fantastic about the first half of the book to me, and I had trouble really getting into the story, as it was just normal life of a girl growing up. She gets into trouble like most teens, and the only thing remotely disturbing is that fact that she lied and help convict an innocent man of rape.

The story is told from first person perspective, and could have easily showed us insight into the mind of a killer, or given us opinions of what a serial killer thought of the events around her, but there were only a few sarcastic monologues that reminded me of the disgruntled teen that she is.

Personally, when I read a description about a book that includes a serial killer, I expect murder to be a huge premise of the story. We don’t really start to tread on the subject of murder until we are almost halfway through the book.

Even though Rebekah’s character falls into the personality traits of a psychopath (for those who study theory of mind obsessively like me), the traits actually tend to sway toward the tame side, and even then I had trouble finding it convincing. I was hoping for more of an internal struggle from the character, and it just wasn’t there. I believe that the author was shooting for a more apathetic personality, which holds true in some cases, but I was hoping for a massive tortured soul, possibly including the audio and visual hallucinations. Rebekah’s psychopathic tendencies fall under the thrill-kill category, but her off-putting personality has you doubting that she is even getting a thrill from it. I was hoping to either see her fighting with the urge to kill people, or to battle keeping her life in control because of the murders, but nether seemed to emerge and flesh out. She seemed to drop in a line here or there that she stop killing, but there was no big internal debate over the subject.

Now for the kicker. We don’t know what really goes on in the mind of a serial killer because most of them have either been sentenced to death, or have never been caught. There are so many varying degrees of insanity that no two would be the same, so to say that Rebekah’s character is unrealistic can be debated, and let’s not forget the fact that this book is merely fiction.

I have to give Loria Lowthert credit. It was a fabulous idea, and I still don’t know whether I like this book or not, so I have to settle in the middle with a 3 star rating. The book was well written and edited, and it had me arguing with myself over theory of mind. I don’t think I’ve ever had a love/hate relationship with a book before, until now.

Read the Review of Part II – Judgment of Evil – here tomorrow!

ABOUT:

Five years ago Elizabeth Piccioni’s husband was arrested for being a serial killer. Her life suddenly turned upside down, she did what she thought was best for her newborn baby: she took her son and ran away to start a new life.

Now, living in a quiet part of the Midwest with a new identity, Elizabeth is ready to start over. But one day she receives a phone call from a person calling himself Cain. Cain somehow knows about her past life. He has abducted her son, and if Elizabeth wants to save him she must retrieve her husband’s trophies — the fingers he cut off each of his victims.

With a deadline of one hundred hours, Elizabeth has no choice but to return to the life she once fled, where she will soon realize that everything she thought she knew is a lie, and what’s more shocking than Cain’s identity is the truth about her husband.

REVIEW:

Okay. I admit it.  I was one of those high school teenagers who liked to read true crime fiction and was obsessed with stories about serial killers.  I think I even owned a mass market Encyclopedia of Serial Killers at one time.  But not anymore! 

But when I came across Robert Swartwood’s The Serial Killer’s Wife over at GoodReads and read the blurb, discovering it was a fictional story told from the perspective of a serial killer’s wife, I was intrigued. So, I emailed Mr. Swartwood and asked if he’d be interested in sending me a copy for review, which he gladly provided.

Elizabeth Piccioni’s  husband is a convicted serial killer.  Five years ago during his trial, she decided to run away with her newborn son, change their names, and start a new life. Within just pages of being introduced, Elizabeth receives a call that her son is being held hostage.  Her horrible past, which she thought she had escaped, suddenly comes back to haunt her. 

Elizabeth must take an unwanted trip down memory lane to seek out what the kidnapper wants - her husband’s trophies from the murders he committed -  if she wants her son back.  And the first stop where the kidnapper sends her is the home of a child molester who recently took up residence right in her own neighborhood.

From there, Swartwood creates a grapevine of secondary characters that both help and hinder Elizabeth during her search, which must be completed in one hundred hours or her son will die.  We meet Todd, the man she’s dating now, her brother Jim, her husband’s old lawyer, a bar owner that helped Elizabeth with a job a long time ago, the bar owner’s bodyguards, the FBI agent that arrested her husband, the agent’s partner/love interest, an old friend now living in Elizabeth’s old house, an old girlfriend of Elizabeth’s and her new spouse, the fame-crazed widower of one of the women who her husband killed, and Elizabeth’s husband himself!  And one of them is the kidnapper that is stringing Elizabeth along!

For me, the story got off to a great start.  I was along for the ride as Elizabeth and Todd jump in the car and head back to her old hometown.  Unfortunately, the book tends to lose steam at times when a secondary character is introduced and their backstory is revealed as the reader learns how Elizabeth knows them and why she is seeking them out.

Swartwood drives the story with tight dialogue and enough “clue revealing” to keep you guessing and to keep you wanting to know more. I was racing through the story to discover who the bad guy was and how the story would end, which by the way was a conclusion I never saw coming.  I wasn’t fooled by the more obvious direction he was leading you in, but I was completely caught off guard when the bad guy was finally revealed!

Overall, I thought this was a fun, fast, and refreshing read.  The book’s cover leads you to believe it could be a hardboiled graphic mystery, but it is more of a suspenseful race against time with a classic “who-dun-it” feel. Well done!  I look forward to reading more from Mr. Swartwood and already have his book, The Calling, lined up.

Reviewed by Lloyd Lofthouse

Coping with the loss of a spouse is often one of the most difficult challenges in life, and it doesn’t matter if the spouse dies young, middle aged, old or somewhere in between. It is a heart breaking journey for the survivor made even more so if he was still deeply in love with his wife.

Although I have not suffered this loss and hope that I never do, as a child, I witnessed the devastation it caused to the aunt that raised my father when her husband of 76 years died without warning of a heart attack. It was as if someone had taken a knife to my father’s beloved aunt and carved out half of her soul.

I also witnessed my mother’s grief decades later when my father died after more than fifty years of marriage. She lived for another decade and suffered every day from his loss.

In “Getting Oriented”, we are introduced to Phil Fletcher, who has lost his wife of more than 30 years. Her death was unexpected. She was in good health and was out jogging when a car hit her.

The depression caused by her loss has caused Phil to feel as if he has no purpose in life. He misses her and writes letters to her, which he saves on his laptop. Then months after her death, he loses his job. Since he is in his fifties, one would think this double blow would be enough to kill him too, but Phil and his wife planned carefully and he is financially secure.

Then Jake, an old college friend, offers him a job as a tour guide in Japan, and Phil is perfect for the job. When he served in the US military decades earlier, he learned to speak, write and read Japanese and accepts Jake’s offer.

Phil’s job in Japan is to shepherd ten middle-class Americans, and it seems to be the right medicine to help him recover from the loss of his wife, whom he will never forget.

Right from the start, Phil learns that being a tour guide is not as easy as one might suspect. Ann, an evangelical Christian and the oldest woman on the tour, warns Phil that Jesse and Sharleen, another couple on the tour, may be planning a double suicide while in Japan since Sharleen is dying of cancer and have weeks or months to live.

Then there is Audrey and Freddie Korch—two sisters. Freddie arrived in Japan several days before the tour started and picked up a Japanese lover in Nagasaki. His name is Kurotani and he appears to be a member of the Yakuza, the Japanese mob. Soon, it is obvious that the belligerent and moody Freddie is being addicted to a Japanese drug supplied by her lover and the drug is called Shabu, known as meth or speed in the West. Shabu is illegal in Japan. Get caught selling or using it and you will go to jail.

If that is not enough of a challenge, Louise, an attractive single woman, attempts to seduce Phil, but his grief at the loss of his wife gets in the way and he rejects her advances. However, this gets him thinking, and a few days later, when Julia comes to his hotel room, Phil cannot resist her and they have an affair. To make matters worse, Julia is not single. Her husband Sal, who is on his third marriage, is on the tour too, but he drinks too much and does not appear physically attracted to his wife. When Jake learns of Phil’s affair with Julia, he worries that it might result in a lawsuit against his travel agency if Sal discovers what is going on.

As the plot thickens, Phil contacts two Japanese friends, Setsuko and her husband Kazuo. They meet for dinner and Setsuko introduces Phil to an attractive Japanese widow by the name of Mariko, and Phil is tempted to stay in Japan after the tour ends to connect with her.

Besides the multiple plot complications, there is the added treat of being taken on a rewarding tour of Japan. The author, Wally Wood, weaves flawless scenes of Japan while the group moves from site to site. These scenes are rich with history and sensory details that elevate the story to a level beyond the average novel providing a rich textual experience for readers. I highly recommend “Getting Oriented”.

This novel would easily adapt to film, which I would pay to see. The copy of “Getting Oriented” that I read was supplied free by the author as a Kindle e-book.