After a most unfortunate day at school, burned-out architectural history teacher Michael Fischer goes away for a Columbus Day weekend jaunt to visit his mother and an old high-school friend. He makes a side trip to hunt for the gravestone of a stonemason he has long studied and finds himself on a completely new life journey. The three-day odyssey upends everything he thought was important. And the stone carver's work, which he has so admired, turns out to be much more than a subject of historical interest.

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. His second novel, True East, follows a genetic anthropologist as she battles the shadowy forces behind her husband's disappearance in the Amazon. He lives in Newton, MA and Delray Beach, FL.

Ray Ahrens invites us into his multi-layered mystery with a college professor, Michael Fischer, who struggles to manage rowdy students and a sexy coed. The novel expands to insights on Frank Lloyd Wright and architecture, then to satiric jabs at our overheated, greedy society. Ahrens builds the story through steps that amaze and devastate me. The complex characters include crypt robbers, art dealers, innkeepers, plus caretakers at a peculiar institute for children. As the novel evolves, the narrator/professor searches for elusive gravestones that seem to be hiding in the woods of Vermont. What is their message? Why does Michael Fischer need to find them?  — Don Gervich, EdD, Writing Coach/Editor