Place in Paradise

As Anna Delinny, a central character in A Place in Paradise says, "There are places of power on the earth. Some of great import to the entire world, others of local interest. Talk to someone who has been to Delphi. Ask what kinds of feelings the place engenders. Or Stonehenge. In such places the sense of power is so strong people regard it as evidence of the holy. In other places, the reaction might lead to less pretentious classifications. Perhaps some would call them haunted, or magic." Langeberg, the dark and terrifying ruins of a St. John plantation is such a place, harboring a malevolent power that Anna and her brother Martin have inherited from their grandfather the responsibility for keeping in balance with the rest of the lovely Caribbean island. When the ruins are developed into a luxury resort Anna is forced to confront the balances of her own life. Torn between her academic life in California and dreams of a Nobel in economics and Martin's dedication to the traditional patterns of belief with which they were both raised, she must decide whether evil is real and must be confronted or if it is a nothing more than a word for human over-reaction to unfathomable events. A Place in Paradise is a tale of the present interspersed with episodes from the past, beginning with the brutal French attack led by Henri Longueville on the enslaved Africans of St. John, who 1733 staged one of the first rebellions against slave owners in North American, to the coming of the human flesh eating Caribs, and ending with the arrival on the island of the Taino, who first settled it. All have reason to fear the place that will become Langeberg, an area in which inexplicable evil resides. A Place in Paradise is filled with richly drawn characters, from Anna and Martin to Hank Longe, who first built Langeberg into the Windmill Inn, to his successors Ed and Claudia Langhorne, and Olga Cohen, the Realtor who masterminds the development of Langeberg. It is a story that will keep its readers awake as they listen to the sounds of wild donkeys crying in the night.