At 3 o’clock in the morning cabin in Wells River, New Hampshire, a man who had called himself John Jones is run over by a car. He had been out walking in the rain miles away from where he lived, and there is no rational way to explain why. A strange drifter, he’d been living in a rundown cabin on Crawford’s Hill for a few months but no one had really got to know him. The local sheriff, Jeremy Wright, searches the cabin but can find only one thing that might help him identify John Jones or that would tell him anything about his life: A pile of manuscript. Could be a novel or could it be an autobiography? There was no easy way to tell, but he knew he’d have to take on the job of reading through it to looks for clues.
The Labyrinth, a romantic adventure wrapped in a thriller, chronicles John Jones’s involvement in a murder when he was 15 years old that shaped his whole life afterward. It tells the story of how he ended up a thousand miles from where he had lived and grown up, in a place where he knew no one and no one knew him. His story ends up getting read by Jeremy, by his precocious 14 year old daughter, Mandy, his widowed mother, Dorothy, and George Teller, his English literature teacher brother-in-law. Each of them ends up with an entirely different picture of who John Jones was and even if that was really his name or if his story was true. They also end up with more questions than answers: Who really was John Jones? Does anyone really have a true identity or does everyone really have a different identity to everyone who knows them or crosses their path in life?