Avia Belle Moon

Temple of the Dueling Heart Avia Belle Moon

Imagine yourself traveling on a journey to Japan to erase your massive debt, only to find herself forced to confront a stalker, a past history of sexual abuse, and a dependency on sleeping pills and anti-depressants. This is what heroine Helene Capri must face in Temple of the Dueling Heart. Like the beautiful Blue Grotto in Italy, her past remains submerged beneath a sea of childhood memories. She must use her monolingual skills to survive the obsessive stalking of Mikari Wolfe, a man in conflict with his Japanese-American identity. Along the way she also meets Anastasia, a Russian art exchange student searching for herself in Anastasia Romanov, the alleged murdered daughter of the last tsar of Russia. From the opening scene of a woman about to jump in front of a train, the interplay between these three characters drives the dynamics of plot in a setting of psychological tension and suspense, shifting between the two faces of Japanese society...uraomote. Temple of the Dueling Heart can be called a ghost story, in that each character must confront phantoms from their past. Or it could be called a brain scan of modern Japan, with a paranormal twist...