The Tenth Circle

When Daniel Stone was a child, he was the only white boy in a native Eskimo village where his mother taught, and he was teased mercilessly because he was different. He fought back, the baddest of the bad kids: stealing, drinking, robbing and cheating his way out of the Alaskan bush where he honed his artistic talent, fell in love with a girl and got her pregnant. To become part of a family, he reinvented himself jettisoning all that anger to become a docile, devoted husband and father. Fifteen years later, when we meet Daniel again, he is a comic book artist. His wife teaches Dante's Inferno at a local college; his daughter, Trixie, is the light of his life and a girl who only knows her father as the even-tempered, mild-mannered man he has been her whole life. Until, that is, she is date raped . . . and Daniel finds himself struggling, again, with a powerlessness and a rage that may not just swallow him whole, but destroy his family and his future.