Burning Sands

When wild child traveler, Isabel is killed on a Goan beach, eye witness Fernandez, tips off her brother, Ness, a battle hardened army veteran in the UK. Fernandez couriers Isabel's pendant as evidence to Ness who is due to leave for Afghanistan. Denied leave by his superiors and placed under house arrest, Ness absconds to Goa. Landing in India, an immigration officer discovers Ness is wanted but he manages to escape but immediately has a chance encounter with Natasha, a Lithuanian expatriate and unbeknown to Ness, a disciple of the cult. Ness's enquiries in Goa’s bars are met with hostility but eventually, with the help of a local bellhop named Thumbs, he manages to track down Fernandez, an ex member of the group, now in hiding but before Ness can get any information, Fernandez is brutally murdered. Later, Ness learns Natasha and Isabel were adversaries and suspects she was responsible for Isabel's murder. Under a false identity, Ness manages to gain the cult's trust and is initiated but becomes spellbound by the group's charismatic leader, Troy and his mother, the saintly Devi. Under Devi's influence Ness reflects on his troubled past and realises his part in pushing Isabel away. He comes close to loosing his mind. Slowly the utopian veneer begins to crack and when Troy has an apocalyptic vision, the group starts its preparations to face the Kaliyug, a mystical Hindu endist event. As truths surface, Ness realises that meeting Natasha was orchestrated by Devi to lure him in and retrieve the pendant, a priceless talisman and was not a chance encounter, as he believed. With the help of her Israeli associates, Devi, an obsessive Oedipal mama had Isabel killed. On a moonlit finale on the beach, Ness has one final opportunity for redemption by saving Natasha from ritualistic murder. ***** Burning Sands is a psychological thriller, which explores the lure of new religious movements and their appeal to alienated Westerners. A karmic odyssey, it asks moral questions about surrogate families, set against a backdrop of a rustic beach community experimenting with spiritual alternatives.