With a devastating bomb blast at a spiritual retreat outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, the disturbed actions of a domestic terrorist, journalist Kevin Pitcairn and his beloved Emmy, Maria Elena Maldonado, are cast into a quixotic, spiritual quest to understand the roots of such violence. That search leads them first across the country deep into the bowels of Southern Appalachia, and a long-standing, simmering rift in the American consciousness. Amid this landscape arise a number of remarkable and anomalous characters, some deeply spiritual, some well-grounded in research and psychology and some that are great curiosities.

In this sequel to the much acclaimed A Killer’s Grace, Pitcairn and Emmy return to the exploration of innocence, while adding to it a deepening understanding of trauma, and a most amazing corollary, Post Traumatic Growth in The Dark Side of Grace. As the quest rips their lives apart, threatening both of them, doors open that lure them back and forth across the country, seeking tendrils to tie it all together. All the while the devastation to the people and communities of New Mexico, their Land of Entrancement, break their heart’s open over and over again.

Reminiscent of what one reviewer said of A Killer’s Grace, “with the pace of a thriller and as thought-provoking as a philosophical treatise and as button-pushing as a theological study,” the protagonists are brought more and more deeply together as events rapidly arise in the heart of the South to counter violence that is so familiar in our contemporary world. Of course, the resolution that comes is as unpredictable as the twists and turns of the plot itself.