For Kevin Pitcairn, the letter from a serial killer awaiting execution comes with implications he can't ignore. The writer's guilt is clear-at least in a legal sense. But the questions he raises draw Pitcairn into a compelling journey of investigation whose profound psychological and spiritual implications hurl his live into upheaval.

As he tries to determine and tell the killer's true story, Pitcairn plunges deeper into the pit his own demons have created and trapped him in. His journalist's curiosity becomes a compulsion as events bind him tighter and tighter, propelling him from New Mexico's stark high desert into an increasingly hostile wider world. Murder, mystery, and redemption shape Pitcairn's struggle to answer the moral questions left festering by the killer's horrible crimes: What is the nature of evil? What choices do any of us truly have? How can we reconcile with our most painful wounds and the people who have inflicted them?