True East

Katy Givens thirty and brilliant learns in a static-filled phone call that her husband Andrew is missing in the Amazon and possibly dead. Although still mourning the death of their infant son Katy flies to Brazil in search of Andrew discovering that the man she married has secrets. As the mysteries surrounding Andrew's disappearance mount so does the list of shadowy forces benefitting from the recent discovery of oil in the Amazon.

Katy's field of genetic anthropology proves useful when accounts of the Unnamed Ones a primitive and possibly pre-human tribe are rumored to exist in the same valley as the oil reserves. Katy tracks Andrew through the jungle deciphering riddles he left before disappearing. Along the way she barters with a Jewish coin merchant challenges chance with a fortune teller and argues the merits of prayer with a Jesuit priest before placing her faith with the indigenous Tadi.

Raymond Ahrens is curious. As a scientist, father, and novelist he peers under the surface to discover what contradictions lie beneath. His genre of "mythic-realism" synthesizes both the rational and the mythic to arrive at a different way of seeing. His first novel Drive explores an old man's perspective in both a real and imagined world filled with mysteries myths and memories. Raymond Ahrens lives in Newton MA and Delray Brach FL.