In Michael Farris Smith's latest gritty epic, a young woman returns home with her child, to her haunted father, while a religious extremist hunts the storm-ridden territory to find the girl who may hold the key to the region's apocalyptic future.

There was no rising from the dead and there was no hand to calm the storms and there was no peace in no valley.

In the hurricane-ravaged bottomlands of South Mississippi, where stores are closing and jobs are few, a fierce zealot has gained a foothold, capitalising on the vulnerability of a dwindling population and a burning need for hope.

As she preaches and promises salvation from the light of the pulpit, in the shadows she sows the seeds of violence.

Elsewhere, Jessie and her toddler, Jace, are on the run across the Mississippi/Louisiana line, in a resentful return to her childhood home and her desolate father.

Holt, Jace's father, is missing and hunted by a brutish crowd, and an old man witnesses the wrong thing in the depths of night.

In only a matter of days, all of their lives will collide, and be altered, in the maelstrom of the changing world.

'Michael Farris Smith masterfully takes us on a ride into the growing darkness of a crumbling world. You couldn't ask for better than that.' â€" Michael Connelly