THE SECRETS OF MISSION DRIVE

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SYNOPSIS

In just a few short minutes Russ’ life changes dramatically. He finds himself inside a riddle with a critical role to play, though he has no idea what it is or what its about.

Russell Pearce is an investigative journalist who decided to quit his newspaper job and work freelance. It hasn’t gone well. The pressure of his failing freelance career is putting stresses on his marriage which is in deep trouble. Driving home one night from the lake district west of Austin where a key source has just imploded his last hope for his last viable story, Russ stops at a tourist overlook on the twisting Mission Drive, a scenic cliffside road high above the Colorado River and overlooking the historic Spanish Solito Mission and its small community. Suddenly the headlights of two speeding cars appear on the winding curves of the drive coming his way, their headlights panning wildly with each turn. As the two cars scream past him Russ watches in astonishment as they recklessly disappear around the next bend—then abruptly he hears screeching tires and the headlights of one of the cars swerve and lurch into the night sky and then down as the car plunges off the road and down the steep hillside as the other car flees.

Stunned, Russ scrambles down to the wrecked car which had slammed into a huge tree, saving it from plummeting off the high cliff down to the river. Inside the crumpled car he finds a dying man. His face smashed horribly, he can barely talk as he fights to stay conscious. He begs Russ to give a message to a woman named Sharlene. The message is cryptic and fraught with urgency and menacing implications. The man dies without telling Russ the woman’s last name.

In just a few short minutes Russ’ life changes dramatically. He finds himself inside a riddle with a critical role to play, though he has no idea what it is or what its about. But as his journalistic instincts kick in, he also realizes that he is outside the riddle as well, and that he has stumbled upon the beginnings of a hell of a story—and an opportunity to turn around his career.
With the help of his wife Maret, who postpones leaving him to help him regain his professional footing, the two uneasy partners peel apart the layers of a complex plot.

It is the story of two intertwining elements: how a controlling and cruel tech company CEO contrives to steal his wife’s lucrative inheritance, the company he runs; and the inextricable complexities of human relationships that no one can ever truly understand, or escape.

AUTHOR’S COMMENTS

Every novel . . . is just a hair’s breadth away from having been something else in the course of its creation.

Over my years as a novelist I have kept journals/Notes for each of my books covering their development from first ideas to completion. There are a lot of dead ends in those journals, but eventually most of them resulted in finished books. As the years became decades I finally came to realize that my frustration at finishing any given novel was that I could never get it “right”. I always felt like I’d missed the mark somehow, even if I was satisfied with its completion. Then somehow, I began to understand that this restlessness was grounded in a creative reality: that every novel is only the realization of one way to tell the story. There were infinite other ways I could have done it. Every novel ever written is just a hair’s breadth away from having been something else in the course of its creation.

And of course, one of the reasons these infinite possibilities are an unavoidable challenge to all authors is because we tell stories about people, and as philosophers have expressed so often, “the individual is ineffable.” One of the human conundrums I address in The Secrets of Mission Drive is the theme expressed in the quote in the epigraph: “Hard as we may try, we cannot be both inside and outside an experience or a life—even our own.” Russell Pearce turns this reality into his advantage. If I told this story another way he could have found it to be a disadvantage. Once again, it is a reality that has infinite ways of experiencing it.

But storytelling isn’t real life, so we storytellers have an opportunity to play “God” and tell our stories from various points of view. We have the opportunity to become omniscient if we wish. We are not confined to being either “inside” or “outside” an experience or a life. So we spin away at the craft, feeling our way into the darkness of the unimagined, to create, to make something out of nothing, and perhaps to tell a truth, or enlighten, or reveal some dimension of our humanity.

Perhaps the thing we fear the most is the “failure of imagination.”