Earnest, naive, and shy with women, the Reverend Denson Roswell is the newly appointed pastor of the Mt Absalom Baptist Church in the south Georgia town of Levidgville during the early 1960's. Instead of being a brimstone-spouting preacher who stirs his flock with sermons laced with hellfire and damnation, he becomes deeply embroiled himself with a temptress who answers his personals ad in an Atlanta newspaper, and then with a deranged, sexually aggressive church member. Tortured by the entrapments in which he unwittingly is immersed, Denson becomes convinced that all is hopeless and is consumed by guilt. Although deficient in worldly wisdom and good judgement, he eventually is saved, his redemption, in the end, coming from the most ungodly and surprising quarter. Derek Smith is a masterly storyteller, and here he weaves a fascinating tale full of colourful characters, set against a backdrop of life in the 1960's South.