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In an unnamed Southern city in the hot summer of 1963, four girls have died in a church bombing, a white merchant who impulsively takes down the Jim Crow signs in his store is harassed by segregationists, every day brings new protests and counterattacks, and a black handyman and a white cop are killed when a stick of dynamite inexplicably explodes between them. Thirty years later, the sons of these two men have returned to the city of their birth, one a minister, the other a writer, each seeking clues to the fathers who were literally blow from their young lives. Their journeys, and that of their fathers before them, are told in chapters that alternate between 1963, when the truth seemed obvious but unattainable, and 1993, when the barriers are down but the facts are elusive and often surprising. The novel telling these interwoven stories is a satisfying, compelling examination of race and human relations, the terrible cost of the sins of the past, and the promise of racial healing.

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