About This Book

When he's out-and-about in Minneapolis, Harry, a retired structural engineer married to Alma, a former music librarian and school principal, always hopes to spot his son Tim, who is living rough and out-of-touch. Harry gets close the day he notices a young, curiously mismatched couple. Christina, overly reliant on a risky designer drug, Blue Telephone, came to Minneapolis because of handsome actor Tim, becoming entangled, instead, with self-described revolutionary Ludlow, a member of the Sun Collective, which, despite its cheery name and positive community initiatives, is actually a shadowy, increasingly sinister assemblage of anarchists. Fiction virtuoso Baxter’s artistry and merciless insights are in full, intoxicating flower in this sinuous, dark, and dramatic tale of the assaults of age, a hard-tested marriage, alienation, entrenched social inequality, hijacked activism, altered states, and convictions turned violent. As abrupt mental shifts strike like lightning, pitching Baxter’s intricately portrayed characters dangerously off course, the country convulses under the authoritarian rule of an unhinged president. Baxter has brilliantly choreographed a wholly unnerving plunge into alarming aberrations private and public, festering political catastrophe, and woefully warped love.