Lazarus Barnhill

Graduate student Koral Walker has a lovely, relaxing spring break in mind-just walking through the budding beauty of springtime in the Ozarks. Beginning with the mechanical failure of her faithful, old Toyota and the intervention of a threatening, compelling stranger-who seems strangely familiar-the next four unpredictable days propel her forever from her serene, scholarly world into a series of dramatic, passionate mountaintop dramas.

Richmond Booe is a bank robber from East Texas plying his trade in the 1880's, cut off from his roots and at once casual and fatalistic. An adolescent act of desperation, intended to be a good deed, sent him irreversibly down a path with no possible happy conclusion. Booe never expected or wanted things to end well for him, until a bright, spunky, pretty teenaged girl-Callie-saved his life.