One day it dawned on me that I had to leave and I had to do it quickly because they knew where I was and how to find me. I don’t know how I knew, but it didn’t matter. (1)

We first meet paranoid schizophrenic and recovering drug addict Richard Jones after he escapes from an institution for the criminally insane. However, the story begins in the first person point-of-view of Mitch James, Jones’s new identity. The next chapter jumps to a third person narrative by Jones about Jones. Throughout the book James and Jones tell the story in alternating chapters.

Confusing? I’m sure.

As an attorney and psychotherapist, Dan Martin probably had some wonderful material to make his psychological suspense debut novel Journey Back believable. He simply didn’t use the material in a coherent, consistent, or convincing manner.

After a mental breakdown in his freshman year in high school, Jones was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and was believed to be controlling his symptoms with medication throughout high school and college. He decided he would be a writer. "Several professors," Martin notes, "had told Jones that his fiction lacked emotional depth, and that his characters, particularly the women, were flat and one-dimensional." (28)

Jones thought his medications might be dulling his creative ability. With that theory in mind, along with the fact that he was jobless and unable to pay for his drugs, Jones decided against refilling his prescription. It didn't take long for the psychosis to set in. This is when he ended up slapped into the asylum after attacking a man with a baseball bat when he finds his equally sex-obsessed and disturbed young girlfriend Anna with the other man.

Richard Jones’s paranoia comes across as believable, but a paranoid schizophrenic’s ability to drive from New York to California in less than 48 hours, change his identity, and land a job writing for an alternative weekly newspaper using a fraudulent resume, is not. While fudging through stories in his newly found job, Jones hears of “something big going on” and decides this story could give him an advantage, both with the newspaper and possibly with his own drug use and inner demons. He knew just where to go to get the inside information. Joseph.

His seedy, old hippie drug addict friend Joseph was one of only two visitors Jones had in the four months he was in the asylum. "It’s been nearly two years since they’d seen each other when all the trouble with Anna and Frankie happened," he recalls, "so Jones was surprised when Joseph showed up unannounced one Sunday afternoon at Quiet Manor, acting like it was no big deal for his friend to be in a mental institution."

Jones knew that Joseph had moved to the Bay area so he calls on him to get the “inside” scoop for the opportunity to write about a secret experiment with a drug called BNG. BNG is said to be beneficial to alcoholics and drug addicts. Its effects allow the users to re-experience traumatic events from their lives and reprocess the memories to help them come to terms with incidents from the past. But the only way he can convince the underground community leader Raoul to let him write the story is to be part of the testing program.