Palo Alto, northern California, 1975
A child goes missing in northern California. Twenty years later, people want to know why, and the past begins to unravel for a group of former friends who thought they’d escaped it forever.
Seattle 1995
A group of students retire to a remote house to experiment with LSD. One, Michael Quinn, kidnaps a child. A body is found. And for the rest of the group the battle to escape justice begins.
Twenty years on, with Quinn about to be unexpectedly released from jail, a mysterious young Englishwoman, Joni Lascelles, arrives in the city, asking questions about the kidnapping, unravelling the past for those who thought it was long dead. The horror of the past comes to engulf the present, leaving no-one untouched by its power. Turn by turn, shifting effortlessly between two eras twenty years apart, the story is played out with relentless compulsion to an overwhelming climax.
Epiphany was my second book. It was completed it in the summer of 1995 while he was still waiting for Semana Santa to be published. At the time he was spending a lot of journalistic time visiting San Francisco and Seattle. The contrast between the two – California with its lost innocence, and Seattle with its hard, uncompromising Nineties materialism- was what provoked the book. It’s a complex, ambitious piece of work.
I’m still pretty pleased with this work. I’ve written nothing quite like it since and, to be honest, it’s pretty damn scary. I’ve now taken a scalpel to the original and revised it from top to bottom. It’s been republished as an eBook on Smashwords for $4.95, in a variety of different formats for modern ereaders and PCs. This is very much an experiment on my part. I’d like to see what happens if an established author puts backlist out there this way. I’ll be telling you how it goes in the blog too.
John Fowles on acid. The Guardian
The atmosphere of mystery, menace and guilt is sustained with great skill, building tension to a seismic explosion as ghoulish characters squirm to escape a relentless past returning to destroy them. Daily Telegraph
David Hewson has an altogether wider range of literary and cultural reference than most thrillers. Impressive… Esquire
