One minute you're top of the world, the next you're in free fall. Fortune lost. Family destroyed. Innocence snuffed. Your right brain knows it all happened for a reason, yet your left brain tells you it was engineered by something more sinister than greed that ultimately requires a reckoning. Who triggered it and why? After the dust of shock and shame settles, you will have to find the truth. But where? Graylin Wakefield, deposed 'It-Boy' of Seattle's tech world, is missing. An expert backcountry hiker, Wakefield has done something completely out-of-character. He's gone on a wilderness trek alone. His 10-year-old is worried sick; his 14-year-old worried she won't get a car at 16. His ex-wife is furious-there's finally an offer on the vacation home and she can't close the deal without him. His brother is regretting their rift, his father is in denial, while his mother-descendant of Lakota healers-senses her son is on an unscheduled spirit quest. His hiking buddies are baffled, but curiously unsurprised. The perils of the wilderness, however, have yet to compare with the dark intent of the powerful man who is determined to prove him dead. But none of them can find him. Their homegrown techno-wizard has eluded cell towers and surveillance cameras-jettisoned technology-and taken a sudden detour straight into the unknown of his Native roots. The sun is setting in the East, time is shifting backwards. Standing above an enormous waterfall, he's ready to change his world or let this white-water-gone-mad take him into another. A cougar stalks him as a raven laughs. An eagle watches. Are they real, or the spirits of his ancestors here to drive his journey? Past is colliding with Present, one world with another, and his life-changing answers are somewhere inside this unfolding, miraculous disaster. Transformation, everyone will soon discover, can come in the mysterious guise of shape-shifting or through a simple change of mind.
About the Author: C R Strahan has lived in the American West from New Mexico to the Pacific Northwest, with a quarter century in Colorado. She writes of conflict and controversy on the canvas of the western landscape, painting stories of family where money meets nature, cultures collide, and personal values are called into question. Her first novel The Roan Maverick, based on the history of Wyoming's Cattle War, resulted from her tenure as research assistant to the foremost authority on the subject and has received uncommon praise from the descendants of both sides of that historical insurrection. Her second novel, Sleeping With Eagles, was written from the context of her years of living in Colorado's Eagle Valley and chronicles the modern life of the ranching Delaney family, who in the 1970s find themselves entering dilemma as Vail begins to boom and tourism threatens to overturn the agricultural economy they have spent five generations building. In novel three, Lucid Dreaming, Strahan explores the history of a contemporary Montana ranching family's genetic bloodline as well as their cosmic bloodline, and the mysterious connection between past-life encounters and ancestry. Watercolor draws Past into Present and Spirit into Flesh in a fast-paced thriller of transformation in its simplest and most complex forms. In her novel Tango's Mirror a world renowned actor faces the dilemma fame has dealt him: The secret of his extraordinary art was his ability to observe human interaction anonymously, thereby gaining insight into the emotions on display in ordinary life-it was his ability to become a fly-on-the-wall that made him famous, and fame has destroyed his ability to become a fly-on-the-wall. C R Strahan has eight years of higher education in Humanities, with emphasis in English & Literature, Fine Art, History, and Business Administration. A student of Core Shamanism, she is descended from Cowboys & Indians; Ranchers & Sodbusters; Builders & Artists-and independent women ahead of their time. She currently resides in the Montana.