Outrageous Detour

Outrageous Detour, Lindy Anne Nisbet, Xlibris Corp., 2001

This is the story of a disparate group of people, brought together during a New Age tour of present-day Peru.

Lulu is a struggling actress from southern California. Hyacinth is a healer from Oklahoma. Ginny is a beautiful, young Australian. Sean and Bud are a couple of Texans. Belinda is from Boston. Ignoring the official events at their first stop, an isolated monastery, they go exploring on their own. They find their way into some ancient, underground caverns. They are joined in their journey by Nardo, a local artist who is painting a fresco at the monastery, and Ubaldo, an agent for Peruvian Intelligence, whose mission is to find a way into the caverns (the two are also estranged brothers).

While in the caverns, the group finds a passage to a land called Tonlea. It involves falling down a bottomless pit, but never reaching the bottom. Each of them are encouraged to make the plunge by a moving globe of blue light which has been leading them through the caverns. While in Tonlea, each of them "acquires" a blue globe of their own, which enhances their natural psychic abilities.

Returning to "reality," the group keeps quiet about their experiences as the tour continues to the ruins at Machu Picchu. It becomes clear to the group that each year, on the Summer Solstice, aliens have landed at the ruins to conduct a certain ceremony. They have been prevented from doing so for the past several years, because a vital part of the ceremony, a specific large rock, has been buried. It's up to the group to uncover the rock with their newly-enhanced psychic abilities.

An openness to New Age thinking, like crystals and past lives, would be a big help when reading this novel. Aside from that, it's quite good. The characters are real people and the story has a high degree of Weird to it. The reader won't be disappointed.