An Innocent Addiction

Robert is a young American who survives an attack on the Paris subway that kills his girlfriend Celine, a French artist. He is left with a broken heart, a fractured skull, an addiction to pain-killers, and a belief that he can find the killer who continues to taunt him as he meanders through the seedier side of some of Europe’s grandest locales. The price to get closer to Celine and to the killer’s identity is another night and another handful of pills.

The tentacles of a growing addiction entice him from city to city, from one back alley to the next cheap hostel in pursuit of a conduit in the form tiny capsules that will take him back to his beloved Celine, the answers to her murder, and the next clue to the location of his prime, but apocryphal suspect.

After tangling with drug dealers and various fiends and characters, including the Italian police; he finds himself once again near death. His struggling mother arrives and nurses him back to health and lucidity in Verona, Italy and he realizes that the truth was in his possession all along and it existed before Celine's death, back in Paris. Through a painting she leaves behind, Celine slowly guides him to a sobering revelation. Certain the key to the killer’s identity is contained in its brushstrokes; he needs a few more days freedom to burglarize a gallery. What he finds challenges his beliefs about himself, the killer, and the events leading to the attack.

An Innocent Addiction as a psychological thriller with elements of a love story and a paranormal murder mystery thrown in the stew.