Book excerpt: “And so the legend goes that if you break the skin of another with the barb of a toothache tree, you will capture his spirit. And the two spirits—your two souls—will live forever . . . as one.” That ancient Indian legend achieves a sense of modern-day truth for a man down on his luck and a teenaged boy, a rich kid who has every advantage that life can offer; but he’s missing one major ingredient: the love and companionship of a father. It was only a simple kidnapping for ransom, until the lives of the kidnapper and his captive become inexorably intertwined amid the splendor, the mystery, the unbridled fun and the harsh realities of the Big Thicket woods in East Texas . . . where sunrise turns morning ground fog into a pink cloud. Where coyotes howl and a cougar roams. Where intense hostility transmutes into warmth and trust in a pair of hearts that were once achingly empty. But Mother Nature, a stringent Society, and a dogging FBI will not let up on them. Initially printed by St. Martin’s Press, The Toothache Tree was also a selection of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club.