After a most unfortunate day at school, burned-out architectural history teacher Michael Fischer goes away for a Columbus Day weekend jaunt to visit his mother and an old high-school friend. He makes a side trip to hunt for the gravestone of a stonemason he has long studied and finds himself on a completely new life journey. The three-day odyssey upends everything he thought was important. And the stone carver's work, which he has so admired, turns out to be much more than a subject of historical interest.

Raymond Ahrens is curious. As a scientist, father, and novelist, he peers under the surface to discover what contradictions lie beneath. His genre of "mythic-realism" synthesizes both the rational and the mythic to arrive at a different way of seeing. His first novel, Drive, explores an old man's perspective in both a real and imagined world filled with mysteries, myths, and memories. His second novel, True East, follows a genetic anthropologist as she battles the shadowy forces behind her husband's disappearance in the Amazon. He lives in Newton, MA and Delray Beach, FL.