The thirteen stories in this collection track strained lives, characters compressed by the crises of our times, from clerical misdeeds to school shootings. Among them: a father and son comet-watching from a porch they built together confront a constellation of familial abuse; a parish priest grooms a fatherless boy; a politico conquers through think tank schemes until he is defeated by his parents' death; a spokesman for a major bank insists that a young intern died of natural causes; and a bishop's secretary discovers a deeper obedience when asked to destroy parish records. Never settling for easy exits, these intense fictions portray a world distrustful of its former guides but populated still by souls searching and finding.