Mage at Midnight

A black goddess emerges from a sculptor's chisel and begins her alluring life in North India. A retired American schoolteacher abandons her mind-numbing retirement to return an anthropologist's artifact to its owner, a young Hindu woman in Rishikesh. An English antiquities seller and his beautiful Indian partner track down the black goddess to smuggle her out of the country. A Hindu swami builds a following of powerful men using unwilling young renunciants in Tantric rites. This is a story of personal transformation intersecting with the dark side of art, religion, and ambition.