Return to Innocence

Glen Erskine is a gifted psychologist who serves as the director and chief of staff of New Horizons, a group home and counseling center for abused boys. Tommy Jackson is a thirteen-year-old victim of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse who has been taken into custody by the Department of Social Services after his mother was arrested for prostitution. At New Horizons, Tommy’s young life finally seems to be coming together. But when he falls into an illicit relationship with one of the staff members, things begin to spiral out of control and Tommy strikes back in a tangled web of deceit that turns Glen's life upside down. Set in the Lowcountry of South Carolina in and around Charleston, this is a disturbing yet poignant tale of love and sacrifice, commitment and betrayal, forgiveness and redemption—and a riveting inside look at the processes and agendas involved in the prosecution of child sex abuse case.

In the summer of 1995 I finished the first draft of Return to Innocence and, after some judicious editing of my own, began the arduous process of shopping the manuscript around to agents and publishers.  I received a lot of praise for the story and the writing, but the final verdict was always the same from editors and agents alike: "I don't think we can successfully market this work."  And so I set the manuscript aside and moved on to other projects.

By 1998 I was working as an editor for a small publishing house and decided to dust off the manuscript for a fresh look and a new try at getting it published.  This was right about the time the infamous Rind Report was in the news for being the first ever study in a professional scientific journal to be condemned by the U.S. Congress.  Hence, I completely reworked the story to make it more "controversial" in tone and subject matter based on some of the findings in the Rind Report. This was ostensibly to make the manuscript more marketable and therefore more appealing to potential publishers.  I shopped around the revised manuscript, largely with the same results as before.  However, an editor at a well-known publishing house in New York did tell me that were it not for other similar titles on their list they would have offered to buy my novel.  Then, in the fall of 1999, I received an offer from a small start-up publisher for a limited print run.  And so the first edition of Return to Innocence was published, albeit in such a limited quantity (and with no marketing) that hardly anyone noticed.

I am offering this second edition of Return to Innocence, which is based on the early drafts of the story, in both e-book and trade paperback so that it can at last be read and judged without the more prurient aspects of the first edition (and the subsequent independent film based on it) that were not part of the story as I originally conceived it.