The Birthday Girl

How do you escape when your mind is the prison?

Joshua Gann wakes up in a cell, but he cannot remember how he got here, neither can he comprehend what he might have done to deserve incarceration. But freedom isn't the only thing that has been taken from him, for his memory seems locked away as well. Struggling, he searches for whatever key might unlock the past.

His captor, Iraqi doctor Tayeb Fahrouk, is an enigma in his own right. Devastated by personal tragedy, he claims that Gann is here to pay for his sins...to serve the demands of justice. He claims that, in order to do this, Gann must remember-to feel-the tragic events that brought them together.

Two very different men, from very different backgrounds, will be drawn together in ways that neither could have prepared for. At the center of it all is Gann's own daughter, Coraline...a girl that connects both men to their past, and in unforeseen ways to a shared future.

As Gann goes on a journey of both recollection and redemption, he fights his way slowly out of the darkness, toward an unbelievable revelation that will take him into a world of nefarious technology and shadowy conspiracy, where love is the ultimate weapon...but our greatest hope.

Jimmy Gear is a starving Master's student who started way too late to pursue his goal of being an English professor. He lives in Missouri.