" Any deep, committed relationship can be a springboard for your liberation or a prison that traps you. The power to make it one or the other always lies within you. "
"That s the fifth rule of Ten."
Tenzing Norbu and his fiancee, Julie, eagerly await the arrival of Ten s best friends, Yeshe and Lobsang, his boyhood chums who have since become the Head Abbots at Ten s former monastic home in India. Ten has helped Yeshe and Lobsang organize a fund-raising event sponsored by the Los Angeles Buddhist temple where Tenzing first taught years ago before shedding his robes to pursue a career as a cop. The fund-raiser s big attraction is the unveiling of a sacred sand-painted mandala that the monks have constructed in the center of the temple.
At the premiere, however, a group of hooligans commit an outrageous act that catapults the story into action. To complicate matters, one of the novice lamas a brilliant protege of Lobsang s goes missing at the event s culmination. Soon a series of strange crimes besets the city. Each crime is unique some physical, some cyber but all are mysteriously interconnected.
Ten s attempts to crack the case pull him into a dark mirror-world of his sacred Tibetan Buddhist tradition; soon he s engaged in a life-and-death battle with a powerful shadow presence. He joins forces with Yeshe; Lobsang; his ex-partner Bill; and his hack-tivist buddy, Mike, to track down the Patient Zero of this epidemic of criminal chaos. Finally, he must face the truth: the source of the evil, and the solution, are a lot closer to home than he ever imagined."