About this ebook
Kell is an American botanist working in Malaysia. He meets the engaging and alluring Nitti and is instantly smitten, but getting to know her is anything but straightforward. Open and childlike one moment, guarded and invulnerable the next, she ducks and vacillates, and keeps Kell guessing why.
Nitti’s mother lies paralyzed in a far corner of their home, tended by a sinister housekeeper who exerts a mystifying control over Nitti and her father. Still, Kell believes he’s found the woman of his dreams, and he perseveres. And Nitti seems to encourage him, leading him to a secret jungle sanctuary, then deeper, to the black waters of a swamp she calls “Keributan,” where a monstrous creature lurks . . .
With lushly drawn metaphor and unflinching candor and empathy, Hibiscus Mask offers a gripping psychological mystery about the preconditions for love and the tragic cost of hidden identity.
About the author
Rich Shapero’s novels dare readers with giant metaphors, magnificent obsessions and potent ideas. His casts of idealistic lovers, laboring miners, and rebellious artists all rate ideas as paramount, more important than life itself. They traverse wild landscapes and visionary realms, imagining gods who in turn imagine them. Like the seekers themselves, readers grapple with revealing truths about human potential. Hibiscus Mask and his previous titles—Beneath Caaqi’s Wings, Dreams of Delphine, The Slide That Buried Rightful, Dissolve, Island Fruit Remedy, Balcony of Fog, Rin, Tongue and Dorner, Arms from the Sea, The Hope We Seek, Too Far, and Wild Animus—are available in hardcover and as ebooks. They also combine music, visual art, animation and video in the TooFar Media app. Shapero spins provocative stories for the eyes, ears, and imagination.
