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George James and Freeman Hawk were unlikely friends. George was part of soft-spoken, old-money Richmond; Freeman came from a hardscrabble country family mired in poverty and marked by violence.

Fate threw them together long ago as freshman roommates at New Hope College. It was the late 60s, and George was the standard-bearer for a society living on borrowed time while Freeman was leading the charge into what came next. Before they left New Hope, though, Freeman would convert George, convince him that there was a better world to be made, persuade him temporarily to forsake the seamless life that already was mapped out for him as the Ham Prince of Richmond. Canada. The option to war-bloodied America, beckoned. The moment of truth came in a small town on the Vermont border, where George James lost his faith in Freeman Hawk or perhaps in himself and hesitated.

Fast-forward to the early twenty-first century, in a world whose axis has been tilted by 9/11. George and his son Jake, are existing in a shaky approximation of normalcy, nursing the wounds of their own, personal loss as George negotiates the sale of the family business and Jake, plunged into despair and rage by his mother s death, is consigned to a private school for troubled teens.

Things get dicier when Freeman Hawk reappears. Nothing about him is as it seems, not even his name. Freeman is on the run, but from what?

In Howard Owen s ninth novel, old scabs are torn off and new wounds inflicted. In the end there will be a reckoning for all of them, and sixteen-year old Jake James will find himself at a border as daunting as the one from which his father turned back so long ago.