Johnny Gone Down

Nikhil Arya was once an Ivy League scholar headed for a career at NASA. At forty he is penniless, homeless and preparing to end his life in a deadly showdown. How he got there is the question the novel sets out to answer. What began as an innocent vacation turned into a twenty-year odyssey across continents. Along the way Nikhil lived through a genocide, became a Buddhist monk, rose as a drug lord, worked as a homeless accountant, built a fortune as a software mogul and fought in lethal contests. Each reinvention left him with a new name and a bigger secret. Now known as Johnny, he is worn out from running. The Colombian mafia is closing in, and the wife and son he abandoned are ten thousand miles away. He steps toward a final confrontation knowing that even a win would cost him everything, though the book leaves open whether that is really how it ends.