RITE OF PASSAGE

About the Book

Rite of Passage is a novel of murder and espionage, and growth, one young man's occasionally smooth and comfortable, but often abrupt and violent transition to manhood as he experiences a mixture of comedy and tragedy.  Modern society provides no satisfactory explicit marker of a boy’s transition to manhood.  It is through his personal development as he falls in love and his survival of unwilling entanglement in murders, intrigue, and deception that he know himself to be a man.

Rite of Passage was planned around Elmore Leonard's formula - one just man, threatened and reluctantly engaged, triumphs. Buck Darke suspects a friend of murder and awakens to the probability that two of his relatives are spooks.  Murder and espionage complicate his transition to manhood and threaten his chances of completing the process. Rite of Passage will delight a wide range of book buyers including the huge numbers of readers who enjoy espionage, mystery, and suspense novels, as well as those who enjoy humor.  It is an original work with engaging characters, conflict, and resolution, which is exactly what fiction readers are seeking today.

Buck Darke only faintly resembles the author at that age, eighteen to twenty.  Buck is better, and far more dangerous, than ever the author aspired to be except in his fantasies.  He is a shadow of young manhood mortified, and then magnified.  He is what Tom Sawyer might have become had he been born a few years older and one hundred years later, or, perhaps, what Holden Caulfield hoped to be in a few more years.  Buck is a character to which the reader warms quickly and wishes well.  The events in which he participates alternate between the idyllic and the violent, between the tragic and the comic, in a manner calculated to surprise and, occasionally, dismay the reader by contrasts.

About the Author

Over forty years ago George Parrish was awarded an Honorable Mention in an Atlantic Monthly creative writing contest and never recovered. He spent twenty-five years as a writer miscast as an entrepreneur. Until 1990 most of his writing time was consumed by FORTRAN programming, reports, and proposals related to CPU, Inc., the computer sales and data processing business he started in 1968 and sold 25 year later to turn to reading and creative writing full time. George Parrish was born in Muskegon, Michigan, where he still lives. He is an honor graduate of the University of Michigan with degrees in electrical engineering and engineering mathematics. He held positions as technician, research engineer, college instructor, and business executive. He and his wife of 40 plus years have three children and seven grandchildren. Rite of Passage was first novel. He has also completed other novels, collections of poems, essays, and short stories.