Donny Lind’s honorable discharge from Army service should put him on a road to a new life. But months later he awakens injured in a hospital stateside to find himself accused by federal agents of kidnapping and extortion. He has no recollection of the crimes, all his memories are now jumbled and fragmented, and the evidence against him is indisputable. He flees his accusers, and when his childhood friends learn of the accusations they embark on a search for Donny, and the truth. With fellow combat veterans Paul Garza and Donny’s cousin, he works to unravel the mystery while on the run from law enforcement agents that are as desperate to capture him as he is to elude them. The suspense of the story builds as Donny and his friends discover clues in their shared history, revealing how a conspiracy with organized crime was planned and carried out. As the real facts of the crimes begins to emerge, the only thing more unexpected than the truth is the reason the crime was committed, and who was involved. The background of the three men is interwoven into the story, first as children, then as high schoolers, and finally as college students in the days leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks that drove all of them to enlist. Aside from the bond of their friendship, they were bound together by their love for a girl named Lorena Galloway. That none of them could approach Lorena’s drive, or rise to her standards, drove each of them to attain more than they could have ever attained without her influence. Her eventual departure from their lives left a gap that each of the men tried to fill in different ways, and how she could possibly be involved in the conspiracy of which Donny is accused is a mystery that only one of them understands. Once Removed has been called “a wonderfully sprawling, ambitious story.” Read it today.
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