A novel about secrets and loss, and mysteries smouldering within mysteries, as the threat of devastating fire looms over a drought-stricken community.

In this blistering summer, the town of Carpenter Creek, and everything south of it to the U.S. border, including Waterton National Park, is in extreme fire danger — as Ray Lemon, editor of a southern Alberta newspaper, knows all too well. His emergency services friend, who Ray has nicknamed The Portent, insists that it’s Ray’s duty to frighten his readers into radical caution. Barbecues, tailpipes, tossed joints, lightning — anything could touch off an inferno.

When Ray was not yet twenty, he inherited the paper from his father after his sudden disappearance — a decades-long absence that became the confounding mystery of Ray’s existence. Now Ray’s oldest friend, Fran, is increasingly angry that he has kept secret the tale of his years in Australia, where he ventured in search of hippie culture soon after his father’s defection. To further complicate matters, the two friends have been called upon to referee a ranch-family feud between the grown children of close friends who both died long before their time. The one thing that is certain is that Ray and Fran are the only two people left on earth capable of sorting it all out.

Acclaimed novelist and beloved raconteur Fred Stenson has written a contemporary novel about the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we tell those we love or want to love — and the gap between these versions of who we are, where lives take flight or flounder. Set in the stunningly beautiful countryside where the plains meet the Rockies, where the oil industry operates uneasily beside sprawling ranch land, and where a mean dry wind can set the whole world ablaze.