Böcker av Ron Savage

Three intertwining stories: 1)Ann Silva has gone to Madrid to work at the conservation studio in the Museo del Prado. She is restoring a Flemish painting called Meeting on the Steps to Hades. The painter is Luc Grendel, a 16th-century Flemish painter and one of the three protégées of Hieronymus Bosh. 2)Taylor Bane is considering a run for the senate from California, but he has to rid himself of some bad baggage. In his college days, Taylor and a couple of his fraternity brothers brutally raped two girls at a frat Halloween party. The two girls were Annie and Mariel. Taylor has now hired an assassin, Liesbet Grendel, to kill Annie Silva. No sense bringing all of that into a senate race. 3)Liesbet has been killing for a long, long time. She's very good at what she does. The Prado also has Luc Grendel's diary as well as his painting. Annie has started to read the diary and the painter writes about a "Liesbet" by name. Luc begins to paint Meeting on the Steps to Hades. Liesbet feels betrayed. Angry and still in love, Liesbet can't bring herself to destroy either the painting or the diary. Luc also writes about her talking of "Worlds other than this one."

Twelve-year-old Franz lives in Prague, not far from the one-time home of the great literary figure, Kafka. Franz was even named for him. His mother, a GP who works at the university medical school, is worried about the rash on the boy's hand. Something strange is going around. The boy's father is an entomologist, who prefers painting to studying bugs. Franz has noticed he is being followed by a hirsute figure he calls the Wolf Lady. What does she want? Then following a tragedy, Franz is sent to live with his Uncle Max in Cuba. Life is becoming complicated in Franz's uncertain world.

Rhea Waye always thought the marriage to her childhood sweetheart would last forever but it didn't work out that way and the loss threw her into a depression, though not the sort one would have expected. She found herself weeping for a father who had left her mother two months before Rhea was born. And it's this absence of a father that has now come back to haunt her, that empty part of her childhood. Her new therapist, Dr. Allison, said it best, "A new loss allows us to mourn all the others we miss, imagined or otherwise." When Rhea was a little girl, her mother made up bedtime stories about the father's adventures and also stories about Rhea and the father. So the puzzle of what was true and what was false left her with not just a mystery about a father who'd never showed himself but a sense that much of her childhood was a fiction. Rhea meets Edward only a month or two after the separation from her husband and she becomes obsessed with him. He fits her father fantasies perfectly. But Edward isn't her father. He is the worst sort of nightmare and Rhea is caught again in the middle ground between truth and fantasy. The truth is that she must ultimately save Edward's nephew and her own son from this man.

Lili (Leelee) Mack and Isaac Stalin are in their forties now and hiking The Way of St. James, from France into Northwest Spain and the Camino de Santiago. Lili knows that somewhere along the way the assassin her father hired to kill Isaac will do the job. Teens when they first meet, Stalin is responsible for an accident that caused Lili to lose part of her hearing. Thirty-one years later she rediscovered Isaac Stalin on an online dating service. Believing that Stalin had damaged his daughter's chances of becoming a great musician, her dying dad has hired an assassin, a doctor who kills people for money. Will Lili go through with her father's plan and deliver Isaac Stalin to the hitman?