Homecoming usually holds feelings of warmth, family, times gone by; but, in Iraq, August 2002, homecoming can mean something quite different, and time can become a ticking clock counting down life itself. This is the disturbing context within which
The Reckoning tells its unsettling and heroic story of one woman's struggle to understand her own past, while trying to survive her present.
Journalist Theresa Fuller has epilepsy, but this hasn't slowed her search for stories of injustice to broadcast to the world. When she is captured inside Iraq in the summer of 2002, and imprisoned by Iraq's secret police, she is cut off from her medication. Seizures resume, and dreams of her childhood in Baghdad begin to haunt her. Tormented by the relentless Colonel Badr, she only finds relief in her growing attraction to Tariq al-Awali, the Iraqi captain who took charge of her capture. The more she learns of him and his family, the clearer her troubling dreams become, and the more puzzling her past. Before U.S. bombs begin to fall and all of Iraq is thrown into even darker chaos, Theresa must find a way to escape the cruelty of Colonel Badr, and save those she cares for most.
The Reckoning won a 2009 Indie Book Award for Multicultural Fiction and was a finalist in two other categories: General Fiction/Novel and Current Events/Political. It's been described in several Amazon reviews as a page turner, with plenty of plot twists...the kind of book that will keep you up late at night.
I wrote it based, in some measure, on my own happy American expatriate childhood experiences in Baghdad, but it can be gritty in parts.
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