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I am not the type of man to disappear. Even less the type of man to walk away from a loving wife and three great kids. Yet, I did. By drifting into a side corridor of the train station, on the way back from a family picnic in the Bay Area.
I had just taken my first steps into an unwilling odyssey that would take me from the basement of an inner-city house to an eerie discovery in a remote Irish villa. I never had any control over my journey and the four women on which I stumbled along the way—each cycling between friend and foe—did not exactly help matters.
Only when I discovered that I had been pegged as Patient Zero in a massive wave of disappearance of “happy people” did I begin to retake the reins of my life. Or so I thought.
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Running from the fallout of the incident that uprooted him from his mundane family life in suburban California, Richard Keiffer finds himself on a South American wine estate where he has no choice but to accept a cryptic bargain extended to him by its maturely flamboyant owner, Madame.
Under her baton, he undergoes an intense and disruptive mental, emotional, and physical reeducation designed to turn him into a member of a covert organization, whose guiding principle is that "much good can be achieved with a dash of evil."
Only days after being dispatched on his first assignment in southwest France, Richard's reconstructed self is tested well beyond the scope of Madame's plans as he is drawn into an unsettling global health scare.
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Three years after vanishing from his life in American suburbia without a word to his wife and children, Richard Keiffer has finally managed to shore up his life on a wine estate in the southwest of France.
Decades earlier in this illusive haven, took place a tragedy that threw a bright-eyed young woman onto a seedy path and turned her worldly gentleman nemesis into a ghostly patient in a farmhouse attic.
A resurgence of that tragedy will entrap Richard in a vortex of events that will force him to rescue the very past he had sought to leave behind and confront the truth behind the derailing of his life a generation earlier.
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