Donigan Merritt

Species of Feeling Donigan Merritt

Captain Franklin Hatcher was a Special Forces operative in Southeast Asia in the earliest days of what would become the war in Vietnam. Leading a secret mission in the jungles of Laos, his team was caught in an ambush and all killed, with Captain Hatcher, called Hatch, left barely alive by mistake. Betrayed by his own commander, with no one to trust, Hatch vanished into the tropical forest and became a mad part of it. After finding the young woman he loved slaughtered in the village, Hatch limps out of the mountains, across the valleys, out of the jungle, out of the country, out of the war, and out of the way of the civilized world. Twenty years later, chased through the world's tropical seas by his inner demons, Hatch has come to live quietly in a shack he built with his own hands on the South Pacific island of Tuva, fishing and scrounging for a living, having found some measure of peace. He finds love again in the hopes of a young island girl who worships him as a hero for saving her life. But when a casual encounter with the crew of an American yacht reveals the secrets of his past, Hatch is about to pay the price of survival. The Last Island is a story of good and evil, innocence and corruption, within the narrative thread of a tragic, yet beautiful, love story, played out within the natural ambiguity of human feeling.