Robert Elwood Burns

Last Updated: Sunday, Feb 19, 2006

Punjab Nights - Work, Love and Vengeance in the Land of Five Rivers

The "Land" is a fictional Pakistan and the "Five Rivers" are those of the Indus Basin. The time is the late 1960s when attempts at representative government had faded and the military and police were moving into permanent dominance amidst a debilitating brew of tribal strife, the heroin trade, a flourishing black market, and a corruption-inducing system of central planning and controls. The looming demise of the faltering military leader heightens uncertainty and tensions to the point where ever more desperate individuals must break the law to survive, and otherwise decent people are prone to deception and violence.

Enter Karl Pedersen, honest, self-confident, straightforward advisor from the American Midwest – more culturally ignorant than ugly – fleeing a broken marriage and seeking a year of quiet healing in a South Asian backwater that, unbeknownst to him, is about to explode. What follows is a fast-moving tale of intercultural love, adventure, revenge and betrayal – from Lahore in the Punjab to Karachi on the Arabian Sea, from the flesh trade to the basmati rice trade, and from high seriousness to low comedy as the sometimes hapless, sometimes sympathetic, anti-hero is bruised and buffeted into a reluctant understanding of the rules of a different and more dangerous game. (Click here to read sample chapter.)

Reactions of Early Readers

"...a satisfying mix of intrigue, suspense, humor, and non-gratuitous sex and violence."

"...the war between the sexes highlighted by the clash of cultures."

"...fully-developed characters only slightly larger than life where the heroes (and heroines) are flawed, and the villains are strangely attractive – good savage stuff."

"Burns is working both sides of the fiction street - a literary, but not intrusive, subtext and a mainstream genre story that rocks."

"...an outrageous whitewash of immoral and unethical behavior. To understand is not to forgive."