Wilderness of Divine Precedent

A journal written by an eighteenth-century British army physician reveals conventional history omitted significant details concerning General Edward Braddock's 1755 expedition to Fort Duquesne-including the death of a young aide-de-camp from Virginia named George Washington, and that something mysterious intervened repeatedly during the wilderness march. And what begins as a hobby to satisfy his curiosity about Shimazu Masahiro's 257-year-old journal instead turns into a life-changing crusade for Henry Yamaguchi, the elder statesman of a Japanese American family in present-day Granada Hills, California. Yamaguchi's obsession with finding answers about a woodland girl described in the journal as "beyond understanding" and "a deity of the forest" ignites a complex search that ends with a stunning revelation that is terrifying yet strangely familiar. These discoveries confound and fascinate both Russell Smith and Lisa Okamoto, a pair of college professors who help Yamaguchi and later find their own lives - and beliefs - forever changed by a series of astonishing events linked to the journal. Yamaguchi's pursuit leads to the diary of a colonial scout (Luther Smith) who also encountered the woodland girl during Braddock's expedition, and a peculiar old book-Kikyoki-written by Shimazu Masahiro's wife. The scout's diary includes an entry confirming George Washington's death in the forest near the Monongahela River. The diary also connects Yamaguchi with Russell Smith, a descendant of the scout and a history professor who is haunted by bizarre nightmares of Indian torture. The translation of Kikyoki produces an equally disturbing revelation, setting in motion a stirring sequence of events for both Yamaguchi and Smith. WILDERNESS OF DIVINE PRECEDENT is paranormal/alternate history tale that will appeal to a multicultural audience and anyone who loves mystery/suspense novels. The story is set in present-day California, with a rewind to events previously unrecorded during Braddock's 1755 expedition. But this is not a tale of time travel. It instead reaches out to spirituality, history, God's grace and how we never understand the complexity of the universe until the final moment-which this novel describes with a stunning twist. An unresolved past. An unstable present. An inescapable future. Those elements mysteriously unite in WILDERNESS OF DIVINE PRECEDENT, written by Donald Owen.