Underground Asylum by Dan Belton

About the book

Mark Conlan, and his son, Jesse, move to California after Mark's messy divorce. Mark buys extensive acreage next to a twenty-two thousand acre wilderness area near San Francisco. Decapitated murder victims are discovered on and around Mark's property. Mark falls in love with a widowed neighbor, Juanita Vargas. Jesse explores the hills and mountain above their property.

Rooster Madden and Wheels Wheeler, two homicide detectives are unable to solve the series of murders. Jesse stumbles upon a vast underground cave/cavern complex on their property. He and Mark start to explore the cave, but are soon driven out due to their inexperience. Mark hires a private detective, Ace Ballard, who is also a spelunker, to investigate two hostile neighbors. Soon Jesse is murdered.

Mark and Ace explore the cave, and are attacked by the killer. They find five mummified heads in the cave -- one of them Jesse's. They are trapped in the cave and a horrifying game of cat-and-mouse ensues with the killer. Rooster enters the cave and disappears. The murderer, cornered in his underground lair, is killed -- the case apparently solved. The surprising female mastermind emerges, re-igniting the chase. She dies in a hail of gunfire and the heads are recovered.

About the author

Dan Belton graduated from the University of Idaho with a B.S. in pre-med. While there he was a record-setting varsity swimmer. He is also a United States Marine Corps veteran. After graduation he was hired as a pharmaceutical sales and marketing representative by a major pharmaceutical company. He detailed doctors on new drugs and medical modalities. He was soon promoted to a medical-research liaison position in Obstetrics and Gynecology. The position entailed calling on teaching hospitals, monitoring new drug testing and updating residents and interns on current medical topics and literature.

After several successful years in the pharmaceutical industry, he left to open his own business, including a giant water-slide theme park, grocery store, restaurant, video-arcade and RV park. He successfully operated these businesses for four years. He hired and trained and supervised a staff of twenty-two employees. Coached little league baseball and soccer. Served on the Shasta Dam Area Chamber of Commerce board of directors.

After selling his businesses, he became a financial planner. He worked for Merrill Lynch, Dean Witter and Paine Webber as a stockbroker and financial planner. He left the financial services industry in 1999 to devote full time to writing, which he never had time to do while working.

Dan Belton is married with three children and five grandchildren, and resides in the San Francisco bay area. Currently, his time is spent writing, hiking, swimming and competitive lawn-bowling.