In this third installment of the Changjai Lamasery adventure series, the Grand Regent has summoned Jake Striker and his wife Mei, from Los Angeles, to the mysterious valley; home of the Changjai Lamasery. Jake is accompanied by Mei, his stunningly beautiful wife who is an exotic blending of Chinese and Mongolian and possesses a fierce temper. Jake had arranged an intricate system of purchasing goods for the valley in Ulaanbaatar: A true believer driver and his son would transport the supplies to the frontier and an armed caravan would then carry the supplies on horseback to the valley entrance. The driver’s young son has gone missing. Being missing is serious enough, however, he knows the source of the Lamasery’s gold. The ancient Lamasery clings to the valley’s granite walls with eagle’s talons and has been protected through the centuries by true believers of the Buddhist religion. The missing young man has fallen into the arms of a scheming wife whose husband is connected by blood to the leader of a vicious street gang. Jake and Mei must ferret out the determined gold seekers before they can make their way across the rolling steppes to the frontier. Add bandits to the golden vortex, descendants of bandits that plundered the Great Silk Road, and their task seems almost insurmountable.

Jake Striker is a tall, handsome lawyer, with light brown hair and storm gray eyes. His wife, Mei, is stunningly beautiful, Mongolian with Chinese ancestry. Both are tied to the secret Changjai Lamasery by an invisible umbilical cord. Jake, who owns a successful law firm in Los Angeles, represents the Lamasery in their dealings in the United States. He also represents the Tu Tung, an ancient order of Chinses assassins. Mei’s best friend is Yanjil, the mother of the child Grand Lama. The Grand Regent has summoned Jake and Mei to the secret Lamasery for an important mission. A Mongolian General is killing people in an attempt to locate the source of his former friend’s gold. His friend is no longer among the living, after having attempted to blackmail the Lamasery for more gold. Unbeknownst to the General, his friend had been sent into the next life by Jake’s former wife, Mei’s sister, who was as fearless as she was beautiful. Jake and Mei, with two Lamasery soldiers, do battle with the General and six of his soldiers while, the Grand Regent spins prayer wheels for them as they’re heavily outnumbered….

The Devil’s Tower, a slender rock column soared 175 feet above the angry Norwegian Sea. On top of the Devil’s Tower was the Devil’s Lighthouse. The names for the tower and lighthouse were bestowed with good reason. The ghost who haunted the lighthouse was grappling with the light keeper who was fighting for his life, wrestling with an opponent that he could not even see. The battle raged on the narrow walkway that surrounded the rotating light. The ghost, as always, won the life and death battle and flung the lightkeeper over the railing, his body crashing on the craggy rocks 175 feet below. Aaron Jurgen, assuming the ghost stories were nothing more than campfire tales, purchased the rock column and the lighthouse. No one bothered to tell him that the Devil still owned both.

Anahita, the High Priest’s beautiful Persian daughter is a clear and present danger to other organized religions. Her faith is four thousand years old. Zoroastrianism is the father of all revealed religions. For five centuries, her faith dominated the known world. Now she is in the entertainment capital of the United States, a city where Aimee Semple McPherson conned millions out of her followers and L. Ron Hubbard turned a fake religion into a multi-billion dollar organization and O. L. Jaggers leached millions from his Great World Church scheme. With her beauty and charisma, with television as her platform, a faith that was the first revealed religion, the first to require a person for pay for their sins, the first environmental religion, could easily explode across the US with Millennials as her vanguard. Every dollar she collects would be one dollar less for existing religions. The faithful put Anahita in the hands of Jordan Stone, a policeman turned attorney. Jordan is tall, handsome and fearless. Anahita is beautiful, charismatic, with an incredible shape and looks like a Persian Princess. Her enemies are legion, from major religions, that are suffering from declining members and fewer dollars in the collection plates, to members of her own faith who are willing to sacrifice Anahita to resist change. Together Anahita and Jordan do battle with assassins, LA street gangs, a religious coalition and crooked government officials, all who want her dead.

The town is small, so the carnival that comes every year is usually small, with a small Ferris wheel and a small merry-go-round. But this year’s carnival has a huge merry-go-round, with six horses in a row, rather than three. The merry-go-round looks brand new, with immaculate fixtures: Flawless horses, some rearing, others snorting, still other racing with flying manes. The brass is polished and the mirrors are sparkling clean. Every child, and many young people, want to ride on the fabulous merry-go-round. People, young and old, buy tickets and get in line to get on the merry go round…never knowing that none of them will ever get off….

Russell Jordan and Amber St. Claire are homicide detectives for the Los Angeles Police Department. Russel is tall, handsome, single, via divorce and a Sergeant on the promotion list for Lieutenant. Amber is a stunning true redhead, single, due to lifestyle and a shape, that could cause traffic to back up on Hollywood Boulevard. They have worked serial murderer cases before, but never a serial maimer. By the third victim it is evident that a pattern has been formed. By the fourth case, the puzzle pieces are starting to fall into place. The person behind these maiming was only attacking graduates of a single high school. The maiming is vicious, from limbs blown off to rapes that hospitalized. After twenty years, the graduates have scattered to the four winds: from humid New Iberia, Louisiana to bitter cold Fairbanks, Alaska. From snowy Colorado to the windswept high desert of California. To compound their problems, every assailant is different, some from foreign countries. More problems, local police departments do not like them investigating their crimes. The closer they come to untying the maiming Gordian Knot, the danger factor increases. Russell is shot at twice and hit once. They have two options, either discover who is behind these maiming, or become the next victims.

Ginger St. Johns had three enviable qualities: she was beautiful, with a shape like a super model, she was incredibly intelligent and she was a true redhead. One of those qualities was in high demand worldwide. She had moved out of Jud’s condo, ostensibly to save his life. Her current boyfriend was not only a bad lover, but as exciting as a chess match on Monday night in Slovenia. He had a conniption when she told him she was going on a cruise to the Mediterranean on a two hundred and fifty million dollar world-class yacht. She was too smart to leave on a cruise with a seventy year old Indonesian billionaire or a hyper rich older Japanese businessman. But the owner of the yacht was Italian, thirty-five, nouveau riche, and four other women were also going on the cruise. She reasoned, “What could possibly go wrong?”