Young and homeless on the streets of Toronto, a fugitive from an unquiet past that has followed him from his hometown in Northern Ontario, Benjamin Doheney is sustained by unusual sources of strength: his devotion to Sanskrit, the ancient literary language of India; the love he shares with Aditi, a PhD student in Sanskrit at the University of Toronto; and his vision of a future with her in India, a land in which she has her own troubled history, and which he has never seen. Before they can move on, they must extricate her from the clutches of her twisted and malevolent PhD supervisor, with the help of his old enemy, a good professor emeritus who has taken the prodigious Ben under his wing, and of Moksha Das, a homeless alcoholic poet and scholar, Ben's difficult guru and friend. When a mysterious murder on campus threatens to draw the police's attention to Moksha, Ben and Aditi contrive to remove him to his old ashram north of the city. But events now begin to spiral out of...

Professor Nada Marjanovic, professor of Sanskrit at the University of Zagreb, has spent more than twenty years translating an obscure text on the vetala, a parasitic, vampire-like being that possesses the bodies of his victims. When her mentor and collaborator in the Indian city of Pune dies, she finds herself face-to-face with the undead that the text describes, an evil which long ago killed her fiancé – and set her on the path of an obsessive scholarly revenge. She must rely on her intellect, mythic lore, and even dreams to piece together the mystery of the manuscript. The vetala's opposition grows increasingly violent as Nada nears the book's conclusion, and with the help of two colleagues, struggles to decipher its climactic secret, which would allow her to exorcise the demon at last – freeing not only the mysterious man whom he has possessed for centuries, but also, perhaps, her own imprisoned and forgotten love. Suspenseful and unforgettable, Phillip Ernest's...