Gifted Heart
In 1947, Ray Petriani fled Texas in the middle of the night with a wife and young family. Desperate for work, he takes a job in California and his boss sends him to inland China on a business venture. A gift exchange with the local potentate gives him two things he doesn’t want, things he cannot reject, and things they force him to protect. Those gifts changed his life.
His research of the first item, a gilded antique music box that someone said belonged to a Chinese emperor, uncovers doubts about its real ownership, raising further problems. Ray refuses to give up his search and believes its significance lies hidden in how he received it.
But it’s the possession of the second gift, a pretty female slave, which rocks his world and generates friction with his wife that reaches atomic proportions and plants a minefield of impossible complications. Town people, officials, family, and associates, all full of righteous hatred toward Orientals, seek to purge the area of this Asian beauty who clearly doesn’t belong in the United States, but China forbids her from returning.
Can Ray, his family, and this newly freed slave navigate the corridors of bitter hatred from the people of their two countries, attempts on their lives from both sides of the Pacific, and bungling government bureaucracy, to uncover the Chinese secrets that entwine their lives?
