The Girl From The River

Physics in the twenty-first century is not for the faint-hearted. Just ask Catherine Langley, twenty-three-year-old music major at UCLA, who stops by the flooded San Gabriel River on a stormy spring evening to help search for a dog that has fallen into the turbulent water and comes face to face with the protagonist of her mother's most famous novel-a ghostly girl who transcends the boundaries of space and time in the fiction, emerging from the river in the flesh, holding the lost Border collie.

The young women forge a fragile bond, but dimensions collide when the river-girl insists an amnesiac man found that winter in the Los Angeles riverbed with a torn driver's license from 1983 is her lover from the novel and also is drawn to Catherine's poet father, who bears an uncanny resemblance to an English horseman she loved in Africa in the sixteenth century.

Lives are shaken by a woodwind scholar from Tanzania, Dr. William Halliday, who has lost his wife and infant daughter and has recently taken a position at the university; Catherine's father suffering bouts of malaria; his horse infected by an ancient sword wound; a physics teacher obsessed with Quantum Theory; a psychotic nurse at the Medical Center; a gay dad who believes the river-girl's story, and his partner, an FBI agent investigating a connected abduction, who tries to disprove the girl's claims; a child mauled by an African lion; and the presence of a Spanish slaver from Portuguese East Africa.

The distressing circumstances do not curb Catherine's passion for the professor nor the girl-from-the-river's contention that Dr. Halliday is her great-grandson, centuries removed.