It's not every day you have a chance meeting with an ex-mental patient who is now a successful business man. It's even rarer when it turns out the meeting might involve you in the problems of the human race.
Cynical thirty-eight-year-old business consultant Peter O'Donoghue thinks the man is nuts. Especially when he offers to pay half a million Euros for a series of interviews. Nevertheless, sensing the chance to have some fun at his new acquaintance's expense, Peter agrees to a non-refundable fee of a hundred thousand Euros for a single initial meeting. The money probably doesn't exist of course, but it'll make a good pub story.
At the meeting, the stranger confirms Peter's suspicions that he is a lunatic. The man freely admits to being a prior inmate of a mental facility and, better yet, claims to be someone who he patently isn't. But...the hundred thousand Euro fee turns out to be real. So, intrigued-and eager for the remaining money-Peter continues with the interview process.
What follows is a bleak but revealing examination of how human beings treat one another, how they treat other species, and how they treat the planet itself. And as Peter's consulting work takes him through the U.K., Germany and Spain, both he and U.K. security forces become more and more concerned about the madman. He can't be who he says he is. So he must be deranged. Mustn't he?
About the Author: Anthony D. Thompson was educated at Lancing College, Sussex, in the United Kingdom. He has a strong dislike of nationalism (or, as some prefer to say, patriotism) and describes himself as a European. Thompson moves around those countries with whose languages he feels most comfortable-Spain, Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, and the UK-and more or less as he pleases.
Divorced, Thompson is the proud father of two daughters and a son. He is worried and angry about the fact that, as the dominant species on this planet, we continue to destroy it, while at the same time being stupid enough to think we're intelligent.
Thompson lives by this motto: "Life, basically, is time. And if you believe that time is the only thing we humans really possess, then the only logical thing to do is enjoy it."
