From a bizarre and raucous weekend jaunt along the Mexican border spinning out in Nogales and ending to the west above the Pacific’s blue and tranquil waters below Tijuana, Eric Lange’s present to his son Steve for his 21st birthday establishes an unusually close bond between the two men. But upon their return home to Prescott, Arizona, Eric decides to change his career track as a machinist and moves to the Verde Valley on “the other side of the mountain” to sell the weed he will mostly cultivate at his isolated garden in Sycamore Canyon.

But after Steve becomes the primary pusher for this marijuana, the currents of the 21st century catches the Lange family up. This happens especially after the divorced Eric’s daughter Mandita’s also comes to the Verde to work to work on his new girlfriend’s campaign for the Arizona state legislature based largely upon her support of a new Verde County insulated from the political clout of Prescott, the seat of long- extant Yavapai County.

But then an unimaginable family tragedy occurs for which Eric is blamed, and he flees south of the border to escape responsibility for it. When the reach of his family of origin further betrays him in Mexico, though, he takes to his heels once more to seek refuge among the vibrant surviving culture of the Maya in Guatemala.

There Eric learns and grows and starts another family of his own, but will he be able to bring his newfound maturity back to the lovely green and shadowed banks of the Verde in Arizona that he still felt remained his home. Book Three of the Norzona Quartet.