Eternal Sojourners

From the author of The Last Detail and Last Flag Flying, a wry, slightly surreal comic novel about love, human connection, and the trials of small-town life. Following a high-pressure rewrite in New York City, veteran screenwriter and expert on the Romantic poets D. K. Kecskem ti finds himself not in his home in the Hollywood Hills but in an unfamiliar house in a strange town where he is greeted not by his wife but by an obsequious houseman who informs that his wife, Hope, is gone. The note she left reveals that she's on a retreat to deal with a personal crisis of which DK was unaware. Exhausted and bewildered, he cannot sleep that first night and wanders the deserted streets. He comes upon three cops, guns drawn, about to enter the open doorway of a residence. The doorway fills with a blinding light and the cops open fire. The victim falls right next to him. He is eye to eye with a beautiful black woman, who happens to be naked. And an angel. She folds her wings as she utters her last words: "Hope is alive." In the days that follow, seeking answers about the shooting and ways to rejoin his wife, DK learns unsettling truths about his new hometown and its residents, who call the place a little slice of heaven, though it may well be his own small corner of hell.