How do you fight a deadly phobia—and a man who’s determined to kill you with it? In a world where daylight blinds and silence speaks, one man, Eli Priest, tries desperately to outrun the cure. *Misdirection* is a surreal psychological thriller in the Hitchcockian tradition—where aquaphobia, psychosis, and mythic fraud converge in a story of emotional survival and ritual reckoning.

SYNOPSIS:

Eli Priest, a brilliant polyglot haunted by aquaphobia and episodic psychosis, believes his psychiatrist has betrayed him. His eccentric aunt Sally, manipulated by her investment adviser Marcel de Verrene, is losing her fortune—and her identity. Marcel, a self-invented Frenchman with a smoothly comforting accent and a trapdoor soul, orchestrates a mythic fraud that ensnares Eli, Sally, and Jess Torelli—Eli’s fractured but fiercely perceptive lover.

As Eli descends into paranoia, Jess begins to pierce Marcel’s mirage. She catches him injured, swearing in a Midwestern twang instead of his usual French lilt. When she confronts him, he terrorizes her with a boxcutter into emotional silence.

Marcel strikes again paying an aide to murder Eli by throwing him into the deep end of the hospital therapy pool. Eli is now clinically dead. But before he drowns, he remembers the origin of his aquaphobia. Dr. Chambers arrives moments later and revives him.  The hunt begins.

Marcel’s financial fraud is exposed by Gray Elliot, a forensic gunslinger. Marcel snaps. He kidnaps Jess and lures Eli to the plunge pool at Horseshoe Falls. Eli fights through his phobia, rescues Jess, and subdues a broken, raging Marcel. Marcel retrieves his gun—only to have it misfire. He spins another bullet into the chamber, but before he can fire, a jagged shard of wood—launched by the falls themselves—pierces his spine. Horseshoe Falls has spoken.

Marcel dies face down in the water. Eli carries Jess from the pool, unconscious but alive. They’re getting married—not as victims, not as broken people, but as survivors.