High Ground

A month ago, Margaret Haart's husband left her for a college girl. A week ago, her father died in a car crash near his coastal Maine home. She has come to retrieve his dog and belongings, before deciding what to do with his house. In the morning light, Margaret is drawn to a looming structure nearby: the Brandt mansion, where she finds Esther, the last surviving Brandt, frightened and alone inside the cavernous, decrepit building. Terrorized by local children who throw rocks at her windows, Esther believes she hears dead family members walking the halls at night. Esther is a reclusive eccentric who believes herself to be an EMF hypersensitive, one who suffers pain in the presence of electromagnetic fields. And, she tells Margaret, she is under nightly attack by searing radiation of an unknown source. Horrified by the old woman's mental state and plight, Margaret turns for help to the townspeople, only to find they have been ground to dust by Esther's long-dead father and his long-closed mill. The only person stepping forward is Ruth, a brassy little school teacher and the only local who drove to Massachusetts for her father's wake. Esther may be crazed, Ruth tells Margaret, but she is not crazy. Atop the hill behind the Brandt estate, a 21st century robber-baron has begun night flights from a reactivated World War II airfield. High Ground Technologies is perfecting an airborne anti-satellite laser weapon, launching test flights that pass close to the Brandt mansion on their way out to the skies over the North Atlantic.

• | Author: Richard Authier Lee
• | Publisher: Independently published
• | Publication Date: Nov 20, 2017
• | Number of Pages: 317 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1973221705
• | ISBN-13: 9781973221708