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If an island paradise existed anywhere, it was surely in the Indonesian
island of Mapura, where Peter Henshall joins the first Europeans to
enter a country abandoned by the Dutch some thirty years before. Henshall
has no time for his fellow explorers, but the alluring figure of Hartini
Sujono, a local nightclub singer, is sufficient to draw him on into
the web of danger and deceit. Mapura is not the land of gold, she tells
him, but the land of shadows. Deep in the interior lies the forbidding
mine of Tambang Surga, where his associates help, confuse and hinder.
Even Hartini, he comes to realize, is no less a shadow puppet controlled
by outside forces than Henshall becomes in turn.
An Internation Art-world Thriller
Beautiful, mischievous and charming: Patrick Staunton is sufficient
of a portrait artist to recognize trouble in the beautiful wife of his
wealthy employer, and hardly needs the warning of mafia connections
from an old Polish friend. 'Of course you will fall in love with me,
I guarantee it', Natalie Stumpfl tells him at a Frankfurt nightclub,
and remorselessly Staunton is drawn into her scandalous past even as
he begins to understand the roots of his own tangled relationship with
women. He closes his eyes to the murders of his father and girlfriend,
and to the money-laundering activities of his employer, blindly following
Natalie through Spain, the art-world of England and Russia.
A Local Romance Beset by Fools of Mortals
At the Buckmayne annual pageant, where he appears as the well-known
and well-liked local archaeologist turned TV personality, Steven Whittaker
stands on the brink of a brilliant career. True, there was his Jill,
his ambitious wife, who is suing for divorce. And the Lawley sisters,
the alluring Penny and bewitching Imogen, seem bent on casting spells
over him and the ancient Dorset landscape as midsummer approaches, no
doubt egged on by the Pagan Historical Centre, whose helpers are turning
up ever more unlikely finds at the dig Whittaker supervises. Nothing
he can't sort out, he assures his TV film director, his Head of Department,
and even the surly Ned Barnes who plans a new age festival on the dig
site.
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