Keith Francis – författare

Is Klaus Hbel a true seeker after enlightenment, or is he merely using his spiritual aspirations to provide an excuse for a succession of love affairs with teenage girls? Klaus himself is not sure of the answer until a succession of terrible events forces the truth upon him, as his young wife, displaced by an even younger woman, sets out on a course that will change the lives of many people and lead to assault, rape, incest and death.

There are elements of redemption: for Klaus, the beginning of self-knowledge and the wish to atone; and for those around him, the mending of broken lives, the transformation of evil into good, and the willingness to crack a joke whenever the opportunity arises.

The Place of a Skull puts a different twist on the old eternal triangle. After losing her whole family in the London blitz of 1940, fifteen-year-old Jessica Smith is sent to stay with a young married couple in the city of Gloucester, in the West of England. Both spouses, one a nurse and the other a naval officer on a few days leave, fall in love with her, and the ensuing tangle is played out against the background of the Battle of Britain.

Woven into this story is the investigation, twenty-five years later, of a skeleton found under the foundations of a burned out science building at the Nave School in Gloucester. The investigation leads to the untangling of the wartime story, and a kind of resolution, if not exactly a happy ending.

When John Hume leaves England and takes a teaching job at the Benjamin Thompson School in New York City, it is with the object of shedding a load of guilt that he has carried for twenty-fi ve years. It doesnt work, however, as he continues to be haunted by his old sorrow and becomes a suspect in the death of a young girl under circumstances eerily reminiscent of the incident that he is trying to forget. While coping with the tangled relationships within a deeply troubled school, he becomes involved with a much younger woman who knows nothing of his past. He faces another excruciating decisionshould he stay in New York and try to work things out, or cut his losses and return to England.