Okeanus

I have finished the first draft of my new novel Okeanus. Here is the synopsis.

Jacques Oiseau, a French psychologist, trained in Uppsala, Sweden, and a Capitaine of the Police Judiciare in Paris, profiles and tracks serial killers. Shortly after the death of his Swedish wife, Birgit, the Commissioner orders the grieving Oiseau to investigate a series of murders, involving arson and cannibalism.

Oiseau summons his team and throws himself into the investigation, which soon produces a witness. The witness warns Oiseau that he is not tracking a man but a Drac, a mythic creature from Celtic mythology.

With this bizarre information, Oiseau follows his leads and interviews witches, wizards, alchemists, and a beautiful representative of an ancient people called the Keltoi, the hidden ones.

The Keltoi directs Oiseau to an alchemist, who informs him that only a dragon hunter, who possesses and integrates a darkened soul shard, can rid the world of the Drac. The problem, he says, is that a darkened soul shard can only be obtained from a magus residing on one of the four elemental planes. Since, according to alchemical principles, the Drac comes from the watery plane, Okeanus, Oiseau must seek help from a magus there.

In exchange for a favor from the police, a witch creates a tear in the membrane separating the worlds and Oiseau falls, naked and unarmed, into an unbalanced watery world inhabited by a multitude of species, arising from or kin to dragons, and the humanoids that oppose them.

He does not speak the languages; he has no map or compass; and, once he arrives, Focalor, a denizen of the fiery plane, who knows of his quest and is determined to stop him, hunts him.