B SINGLETON

THE ASHES OF THE GODS

Alphonsus Q Mann III, leader of a New Age sect flees to Ireland, from the authorities in the United States, who seek him for currency and tax violations. He buys a mansion - Martin's Castle Hotel - on the Burren in the west of Ireland, operating under the guise of running high-level management training courses, in a technique called 'Reality Imaging'.

Patrick Denk, Mann's second-in-command is sent in advance to purchase the property. Although initially suspicious of the locals, Denk comes to rely on the local estate agent Jim O'Connor, and his daughter Julia, a former nun. While O’Connor’s neighbours the Joyce triplets, keep a close eye on the newcomers.

Tension arises between Denk's mechanistic world view - as expounded by his guru Mann - and Julia's Pantheism which she explicates for Denk through the natural world of the Burren.

Alphonsus Q Mann III, believing that he had lived before, convinces Denk that Julia, in a former life, was his arch enemy, who stole pages from a magical book, the Book of Kells, that he was compiling. These missing pages are important for the completion of Mann's quasi scientific and mystical theories, while they also represent the flaws within his own obsessive character. Denk and Julia are drawn into the psychotic fantasies of the cult leader when his personality begins to disintegrate and a deadly game ensues.

Denk is forced to face up to his situation when Mann, sensing his disillusionment with the cult, warns him that Julia is expendable and then tries to blackmail him. Denk's growing lack of faith in Mann's teaching culminates in a terrifying epiphany as he wanders lost and badly injured at night, on the mountains of the Burren, after escaping from Mann's henchmen.

After her former lover, the American scientist, Joachim Schneider killed himself in the old hotel, Julia believes it is haunted and has vowed never to set foot in it again. But her estranged and eccentric neighbours the Joyce brothers seem to know exactly what is going on there.

And as Denk digs into Julia's and Joachim's history and that of the hotel, he starts to believe that the scientist's death was more than suicide. Stealing a bundle of love letters written by Schneider to Julia, he comes to the realization that the key to the scientist's death lies in his last unfinished letter, and that it's not only Mann who wants Julia dead. His worse fears are realized when she goes missing. His search for her taking him on a dangerous, underground odyssey into the heart of the Burren and the psyche of those who wish for more than Julia's death.