Martin Jeppesen, a down-to-earth, savvy marketing executive, deals with stress by imagining things - a bat wafting around a boardroom, for example, or molten ink enveloping the head of a garrulous luncheon companion. As his life becomes more and more stressful, his imaginings begin to run wild and hallucinations eventually dominate his life, to the point where the only thing he thinks is a hallucination is reality. How he deals with this, and how it affects the people in his life, is the subject of The Madman's Kiss.

Martin Jeppesen, a down-to-earth, savvy marketing executive, deals with stress by imagining things - a bat wafting around a boardroom, for example, or molten ink enveloping the head of a garrulous luncheon companion. As his life becomes more and more stressful, his imaginings begin to run wild and hallucinations eventually dominate his life, to the point where the only thing he thinks is a hallucination is reality. How he deals with this, and how it affects the people in his life, is the subject of The Madman's Kiss.

A mysterious adventurer, operating under a curse that he cannot fathom, wanders the earth ceaselessly, siring children in his wake, He is pursued by a young woman obeying her mother's deathbed command to track him down and punish him. The man may or may not be her father; the punishment is for an offense that may or may not have happened. But the woman is relentless and beyond reason.

Both of them consult a powerful oracle in Timbuktu on their way to a final reckoning at one of the most desolate hellholes on earth, the salt mines of Taoudenni, a Saharan prison from which few...