Book details

  • Genre:fiction
  • Sub-genre:Action & Adventure
  • Language:English
  • Pages:240
  • Paperback ISBN:9798317835453

Determinada

By Martin O'Neall

Overview


Andy and Cindy Hayes have spent years leading mission teams into the river villages of the Brazilian Amazon, serving communities where distance is measured in days and the river governs everything. On their latest trip, Andy boards a small plane for a brief side journey—part necessity, part quiet adventure—over a stretch of rainforest few outsiders ever see. The plane does not return. With Cindy already in Brazil, the search begins immediately. Aircraft sweep the canopy. Grid patterns extend across miles of unbroken forest. Days lengthen into weeks, and the jungle offers no answer. The Amazon keeps its silence. Far beyond the search grid, Andy confronts a world reduced to essentials: heat, hunger, injury, isolation. Survival is deliberate—measured in choices made hour by hour. Help comes, though not in the way anyone expected. Refusing to accept absence as final, Cindy presses on long after official efforts lose momentum. Across remote terrain and uncertain ground, two journeys unfold—marked by faith, endurance, and a resolve that refuses to yield. In the vast silence of the Amazon, survival is not accidental. It is chosen. It is lived. It is Determinada.
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Description


The plane is overdue. Andy Hayes departs on a short side trip into the Brazilian Amazon—routine, familiar, nothing unusual. By nightfall, it hasn't returned. There is no signal. No debris. No explanation. A massive air search is launched. Search aircraft sweep the rivers. The effort is exhaustive—and fruitless. The Amazon keeps its secrets. Cindy, his wife, is already in Brazil when Andy vanishes. She watches hope slowly thin as officials begin to speak in careful tones and measured probabilities. The jungle is vast, they say. Survival is unlikely. She refuses to accept it. Cindy begins her own search. Inspired, not impulsive or reckless. Methodical. She travels beyond well traveled routes moving along remote tributaries and into isolated villages where information travels by rumor and memory. Every conversation could hold a clue. Every mile reveals how small one person is against the immensity of the rainforest. Meanwhile, Andy fights a battle no search team can see. Heat suffocates. Humidity drains strength. Insects swarm. The water he drinks takes its toll, illness creeps in. Exhaustion blurs judgment. The jungle presses in from every side—beautiful, relentless, indifferent. Survival becomes a choice made hour by hour. Yet help arrives from an unexpected source. As Cindy's search stretches longer, fatigue weighs heavy, doubt becomes its own adversary. The terrain is unforgiving. The lack of results is heavier than the heat. And still she presses forward. Set against the sweeping rivers and dense canopy of Brazil, Determinada draws on real experience in the Amazon to create a vivid and immersive landscape where nature itself becomes a formidable force. But at its heart, this is not only a story about surviving the wilderness. It is about refusing to surrender to it. When answers disappear and hope grows thin, determination becomes more than a trait. It becomes the only way forward
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About The Author


Martin O'Neall is a retired Midwestern crop farmer whose life beyond the fields has carried him deep into the river systems of the Brazilian Amazon. For more than twenty years, he and his wife led short-term mission work trips into remote rainforest regions, traveling by river boat and light plane to reach villages scattered along the Amazon River and its tributaries. Those journeys—marked by long days on the water and the realities of life in isolated communities—have given him firsthand experience in places few outsiders ever see. Being an avid photographer he has taken thousands of images of the unique people and locations in the jungle. Drawing on those years of travel, Martin writes adventure fiction grounded in real landscapes, real logistics, and real endurance.
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