Kirjahaku

Christopher Johnson has grown up in a very lonely countryside. He hides his feelings well. His friends have all gone off to college or to the city or the world somewhere. He is going mad and he knows it. Slowly but surely he is being consumed by a hellish quagmire of anguish and despair. There is no way out. But one dark night on a bridge his encounter with a girl called Karma, a mysterious newcomer with a shadowy past, sets a train of events in motion that rock his mundane existence and force him to seek answers to the questions that haunt us all: What is the purpose of life? Who are we really? Why do things happen the way they do? Does destiny exist, and is the law of Karma eternal? In this mix is an ever present orchestrator, an old man with more than a curious interest in the newcomer. As he secretly races against time and mortality to reunite lost souls the pieces finally begin to fit. But when Karma disappears it looks as if this cycle of birth and rebirth will go on and he will be condemned to suffer more. They all will.

Rural Ireland is in the grip of fear. Violent criminal gangs travel out from the cities to rob and beat-up country folk. Now one of these notorious gang leaders, a psychopath known as The Poison, has suddenly disappeared, and his last known location is a small quiet village. But nobody is talking.Aspiring reporter Janis Frost, who has a proclivity for chatting aloud to the dead poet Robert Frost (no relation), is sent to find out what is going on. She soon learns that close-knit communities have a language outsiders cannot hear, and that to be accepted inside, one has to learn to be quiet; to keep secrets. As she befriends Big Jim Power, a bachelor farmer famous locally for his short temper, she begins to suspect that he has something more than effluent in the tanks beneath his sheds. Despite her earnest efforts, she has no idea that she is being tested, or that there is a gang on their way to the village intent on revenge for the loss of a consignment of drugs.What the gang don't know, is that Power has a deadly ally in Sam Waits, a former elite member of the US Special Forces, who haunted by a tragedy from his childhood, lives alone in the woods outside the village. By the time Janis Frost joins the dots and figures out what is going on, she realises that she wants to be on the inside, that she wants to be part of the community. The only trouble is, she is about to die, and if she wants to live, she only needs to answer one simple question: can she keep a secret?