 |
"Secrets in the Fields" CrossTIME Publishing
|
 |
About the Author... Roger Burbridge
Roger Burbridge has been a soldier, a Doubleday textbook editor, a freelance science writer, an English professor, and a licensed psychologist. His articles have appeared in The New Book of Knowledge and several journals of literary criticism. He is currently a domestic violence counselor with TASC, an agency in Cottonwood, Arizona. He has taught writing at several universities and helped design a Master's in Writing program for the University of San Francisco.
Roger has a bachelor's degree from M.I.T., an English Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut, and a counseling Ph.D. from the Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He lives with his wife Mary and one cat in Sedona, Arizona. His two grown children and a four-year-old grandson are in California.
A description of Secrets in the Fields
Secrets is a suspense story in a New Age/Mystical framework. The major characters are Jillian Truscott, a woman who has reached a point of desperation in her life after a failed marriage, and her brother Jimmy, who has been hired to kill her. Both come from an abused background, but they have not seen each other since Jimmy was twelve and Jillian was fifteen, when she ran away from home. Jillian has led a somewhat marginal life but managed to marry and have children. Jimmy, who now calls himself Handler, has murdered their abusive father and, despite his repressed guilt, becomes a hired killer. Their paths are fated to cross several times in southern England, the site of hundreds of crop circles whose origin and purpose are a mystery.
The mystical elements of the story emerge early. Though the memory is later taken from her, Jillian learns from a circle of elders that she is to play a role in healing the earth; her own healing also begins at this point, as she is able to let go of her anger at the world. She journeys to England to research a crop circle tour that a travel agent wants to arrange for the following spring. She is followed closely by Handler (Jimmy), who has been recruited to stop her by what he believes are beings from hell. A lapsed Catholic, Handler believes his soul is unredeemable.
In a climactic scene in a crop circle, where he has arranged to kill Jillian, Handler learns that Jillian is his sister. Crazed with the knowledge, he runs from her, decides to carry out the killing anyway, rationalizing it as the will of a God he hates, but fails in the second attempt and is arrested. Meanwhile, Jillian and a new friend Bill have had an ecstatic crop circle experience that shows the earth has begun healing. After this experience she is able to meet with Handler, now Jimmy, and forgive him. She and Bill become lovers and partners.
The movement of this novel is toward healing and redemption -- the healing of Jillian and her brother and of the earth itself. Despite this serious quasi-religious theme, there is plenty of comic relief, due largely to Jillian's Bed and Breakfast landlady Daisy and some irreverent banter between Bill and Jillian.
Return to Authors' Showcase
Home