A Nordic Noir novel about love, life and death where Michael joins an Alpine Abbey to investigate the unexplained death of his uncle, a Benedictine monk. Beneath the medieval walls, he discovers a labyrinth of tunnels - and a secret passageway to a world of eroticism and madness. After a beautiful young postulate is found dead in the monastery, Michael goes on the run like Caravaggio, a bad tempered artist on the run after sexual scandals and murder. Snared by the police and locked in an arctic asylum, previously a medieval convent, a crazy cuckoos nest, Michael encounters the Blue Magic Woman who fulfills his deepest desires, but her powers extend far beyond her beauty and mystical allure. She is an ethereal connection between spirituality and sexuality. Again like Caravaggio, the artist with whom he identifies, he escapes, but the Blue Magic Woman has him in trance on the other side of the medieval walls. With his Russian connection Michael becomes entangled with deserters from the Soviet submarine, the Trojan Seahorse that ran aground in the Swedish archipelago. And in the company of the Babushka Boys he becomes enmeshed with the gang rape and murder of a female student in the Uppsala Anatomical Theater where dissections were held long before Jack the Ripper. The page-turning plot takes the reader to many dangerous landscapes, as he finally makes it to Marrakech, but the most intriguing are the internal landscapes of the mad artist that few have seen. This is a mystical novel within a novel, a book of madness and wonder... a psychological murder mystery merged with the lurid, the lovely, the lost.

About the Author

James van Loon besides being a novelist is a university psychology instructor, chartered psychologist, and international consultant. His artistic and scientific journey is one of many divergent paths, spanning
a brief career as a radio disc jockey in his native USA, an introspective experience as a monk in the Marist order, and academic studies of literature and psychology in several European and North American universities. His peregrinations have taken him to the cobbled streets
 of old European towns speckled with cafes and compelling characters, where he nurtured his passion for research and writing. He has lectured at universities in Italy, Spain, Germany, England, Sweden, and the U.S.A. where he has also taught workshops on mystery writing at the Writers Garret. Paola Bortolotti has been a passionate linguist, an accomplished translator, and writer all her life. Her deep interest for the arts, as a model, painter, and a porcelain artist, have contributed to a unique, multifaceted approach to life and texts, including her fictional writing. She has won
 the prestigious De Witt Literary Prize, as well as received much other praise for her writing. A compelling fascination for the other in realities and perspectives as different from her own native Italian background has taken her to different parts of the world and total cultural experiences. She lives in the breathtaking medieval town of Anguillara nestled at the edge of the volcanic Lake Bracciano north of Rome.